'Onimusha: Way of the Sword' Reactions and Capcom's Career Year | Button Mash

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Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Hello, and welcome into the Ringerverse, your Nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor at the Ringer and your host here at Button Mesh, where you can't even tell that all of our faces are uncannily AI upscaled because we aren't on video yet. There are three other faces and voices with me today. Two will be familiar. One belongs to senior audio producer and Midnight Boy, Steve Allman, who hardly needs Jensen Huang's help to look his best. Hi, Steve. Hey, I'm just done sucking down demon souls, and now I just need AI upscaling to make me look even prettier. Perfect. Speaking of looking your best, I'm blowing up your spot for a second. I recently friended you on Facebook because we're old. Oh, my gosh. And so I still do that from time to time. You did? I haven't been on that in a minute. I think you accepted. So you must have been aware. Oh, did I? Okay. Yeah. You're probably just auto-accept, you know. I think I did. You probably have so many people wanting to be your friend. Yeah. Well, one thing you used it for recently was sharing a photo shoot you conducted, which I am now privy to. Now, was this part of the recent Vanity Fair Midnight Boys feature, or was this a solo project just for fun? No, this was part of some Spotify press photos that was both offered to podcasters and also offered to anybody that wished to take them. It was like a fun day at the office where pretty much anybody could get professional headshots taken. Really? Where was my photo shoot? I guess they don't do Spotify home mix visits. They don't do the home office photo shoot. Listen, you can make the call. You've got far more important people on your phone than I do, Ben. You can absolutely make that happen. I thought this was all about Vanity Fair, but no. This was a personal Steve joint, though. I did enjoy that Vanity Fair shouted out your unapologetically black sensibility, which we all appreciate. It really is by popular demand. So in this photo shoot, there are some great shots. There are a couple of you peeking coquettishly above. An upturned collar just peering out. See, this is where we need the video components to the podcast so that people who are not Facebook friends with Steve could appreciate this. But there's one particular image that I've been thinking about. It looks like you started to do a split and then halfway down your back locked up and then you sort of grimaced through it. And so you're just sort of bent over with your hands behind your back and your legs split. What's the story here? Was that just you freestyling? Well, this was actually me recreating a very famous Willem Dafoe photo shoot where he too did that exact same pose and that has since become a rather iconic meme. When the photographer says, have fun, I'm like, this is the only thing that I could think to do. That's just your go-to? Willem Dafoe poses, yeah. Right. That's what you do just in your candids when someone says cheese and you just immediately launch into the Willem Dafoe. Okay. Yeah. I'm glad you have that. But listen. I'm not going to hop into the term coquettishly whenever that comes across because that's now the word of the day. The second voice and face belong to Ringer deputy art lead Matt James, who as far as I know has not been featured in a photo shoot lately and who definitely does not use NVIDIA's DLSS 5 for his excellent lead images on TheRinger.com. Howdy, Matt. Howdy, Ben. Yeah, if you want to do like a personal photo shoot yourself in your home, maybe I can Photoshop them. Does it get that Vanity Fair look for you? Yes, that's right. We don't need the AI upscaling. We have Matt airbrush it with the human element, right? It's the Photoshop personal touch that he delivers every day. Do you have a go-to photo pose if someone snaps a pic of you? Oh, yes. Also Willem Dafoe. Yeah, of course. Yeah, that's right. Well, one of your excellent lead images adorns an article published on Thursday by our third guest. Making his button mash debut all the way from his home in Glasgow. It's Lewis Gordon. Welcome, Lewis. Hello, hello. Hello. Nice to be here. So happy to have you. Lewis freelances for many a site, but we're always happy to have his deep dive features. GraceTheRinger.com. What a great website. And it was a great website on Thursday. In part, thanks to Lewis's excellent reporting and piece on Capcom. It's called How Capcom Cracked the Code of Game Development. You talk to a ton of people. You talk to people at Capcom, outside observers and analysts about how exactly Capcom keeps killing it. Because we are going to be talking today about your piece and also about the latest release, which has capped off the year of Capcom, which we tease coming into 2026, that we were going to have New Resident Evil. We were going to have Pragmato. We were going to have Onimusha, Way of the Sword. And now that final game has arrived. It's as good as advertised. And this is going to be a great game. This might just be a career year for Capcom. So I am very much looking forward to talking to you about how that's happening. Why Capcom can't miss. Because a lot of other companies are having issues as Capcom is just on this incredible streak of success. And we will get to Capcom shortly. We will talk a bit about Orbitals. We'll get into some other games. But our Patch Notes news section leading off this episode, I guess we could begin with, with a company that did produce an excellent game, but did encounter some struggles along the way. So behind the scenes, we were hoping and planning to bring you an interview about Star Wars Zero Company today and the making of that great game. We still hope that will happen sometime soon, but it is not happening today. Thanks in part to the fallout from a report by former Button Mesh guest, Steven Totillo at Game File earlier this week about Bit Reactor, the startup studio that developed the excellent Star Wars Zero Company. Turns out that the majority of the people at Bit Reactor were furloughed shortly before this game came out, which changed the tenor of the conversations and victory laps surrounding this game. As many as 80% potentially of the personnel at that studio have not been working, have not been paid lately because the studio seemingly, essentially ran out of funding. And there is also a lawsuit that Steven unearthed that pertains to a dispute about ownership of the studio between a couple of the co-founders. Perhaps that hasn't helped this situation, but this doesn't seem to stem from that. It doesn't even seem to be anything particularly nefarious. It is just an all too common story in game development these days that even successful games and studios, well, behind the scenes, they are sometimes struggling to make, end, meet. So were you surprised by this story, Lewis, dropping in the midst of your reporting about how Capcom can do no wrong? I'd like to say I was surprised, but I mean, you just, I don't think you can be surprised at anything that happens with studios, particularly, I guess, particularly in the West, in North America and Europe anymore. Yeah, and it doesn't seem to be anything related to electronic arts or Disney. It's just a tale that we hear, all too often these days. Game development takes a long time. It costs a lot of money. And sometimes there's just not enough runway. And so we've seen a number of cases where a game bombed or didn't hit the way that it was expected to. And shortly after that, we heard about layoffs. I think that's why this seems a little bit different. This is not High Guard. This is not 2XKO, something like that, where the planned post-release roadmap got scuttled because the game had a light launch. And thus, wasn't generating revenue. And thus, people were laid off and studios were downsized. In this case, the game seems to be going gangbusters. But of course, that doesn't help you before the game actually comes out, right, Matt? So it's lamentable that this happened, obviously. And I guess it's also an even greater tribute to the finished product because the game is great. It is. And I do think, though, that, you know, knowing this now, the three of us have, talked about Zero Company and how, you know, our only critique of it really was that there's a bit of jank, a bit of unpolishedness, a few, you know, stutters here and there, some weird camera stuff, all of these things that, you know, we noticed but didn't super impact our time with it. But you would assume that those are the kind of things that, you know, a normal studio functioning at full capacity would spend the last few weeks leading up to the game ironing out. So perhaps, you know, that is what we're seeing here is that by the time they got to that final stage of smoothing things out, perhaps, you know, there weren't that many people around to actually do that work. Yeah. Reportedly, there is still a skeleton crew that's a different Star Wars property, but also an expression that is still at the reactor, maintaining the game, patching the game. And hopefully the success of the game will enable people to come back to work. And. Get paid or in the worst case scenario, I guess, get good work elsewhere on the strength of having worked on this game. But sales have been strong. This is not just a critical favorite. This is not Marvel's Midnight Suns, where the sales didn't really mirror the critical reception. This game has been a hit and a well-deserved one. So I hope that that does lead to a second act for Bit Reactor and for a lot of the people who had a hand in making this great game coming back to work. And also, Steve. I suppose it would be a shame if this story distracted from how good the game is. Right. I mean, it's a it's a minor miracle that any game gets made. But you're right, Matt. It's even more of a wonder that this thing shipped in any playable form if money was that tight. So it's it's particularly impressive. But yeah, Steve, I hope that we can all, if anything, just pull for this game in studio even more, knowing the circumstances under which this game was produced. Of course. I would have nothing but good things to say about this game and as well as to root for anyone and everyone that worked on it, both furloughed and not. It seems like we can't really escape the narrative of the like terrible state that this industry is in, even with some of our critical darlings that have been emerging from the past few years. Like this, this struck me like a sort of like high fry rush scenario while that game studio shuttered and the property was left. And that game was more or less finished. This seems to be something that like I don't know the certain like financials or particulars of that furlough to what needs to be happening for those people to get their jobs back. But to know that this thing has just kind of been released out into the ether in the very good, but like, you know, still to be improved slightly state that it's in and know that that could just be it if this weren't a critical masterpiece or like something that was as well regarded as it was like to know that. This is an industry that is kind of unwavering in its use of, you know, funds and and success metrics and all those things to just simply cut a project out from under itself when this is a living, breathing document for a couple of weeks and months after its release. So it's a shame, but I'm without a doubt certain that if this continues, its level of success now, then I have no doubt that this is going to be this won't be the last that we see from those workers in studio. Yeah, it is a lamentable reflection. Of the state of the industry, except, of course, for Capcom, where everything is going great. But I hope to bring you more on Zero Company soon, because, again, I think that the game deserves to be celebrated and praised and discussed and that this should not distract from the greatness of the game. If anything, it should only make that more impressive. Another thing we planned to talk about at some length today, but probably will not be is Sony's State of Play presentations on Thursday, which. You know, you expect a certain number of announcements and headlines from a state of play. This didn't particularly deliver on that score. And no, Sony did not announce that they're calling backseas on doing away with discs. Just kidding, guys. We weren't serious about that. No, they're still still sticking to their guns on that one. But also, there wasn't much in the way of new games. We got a lot of looks at already confirmed games and games that are coming up soon, some of which we won't be discussing. On this podcast and some release dates and reminders about things that are coming early next year. But I think it's it's sort of similar to what we were saying about Gamescom and opening Night Live. It's just GTA is coming, you know, and so everything has cleared out of the fall and winter calendar. And so there's not all that much to hype except for, yeah, continue to look forward to Final Fantasy, various Final Fantasies. So, you know, games looked good. Games were shown proof of life, but not much new to discuss. Tons of DLC. Lots of DLC. Lots of DLC. For pretty much everything you've touched in the past two years seems to be getting some form of additional content. Or the past 11 years in The Witcher's case, though that was not shown here. But yeah. And Capcom, of course, got in on things, too. Getting some DLC for Monster Hunter Wilds, as if Capcom has not been prolific enough. But yeah, not a ton came out of this. So we probably will not dwell on that. I will note, Steve, you hipped me to some Sony-related news. So there has been good news on the console sales front, not exclusively PlayStation sales. In fact, across the board. Right. Hey, I have to take my little victory lap here. If it leads to you being right, you will take my notes and features. Absolutely. Yes. So last week, after console sales really bottomed out in July and the sales figures were dire, there was some good. Good news recently, as just about every system was up significantly in terms of units sold. PlayStation and Xbox by about a third week over week. Even the Switch 2 was up, though that was more about, I think, getting purchases and under the wire before the price hike. But there was a PlayStation and Xbox sales bump as well, which seems to be largely related to GTA 6 and the extended look that renewed the hype, fanned the flames for that game. And that was one of my big questions about GTA. Will this be a system seller? And I think it's tough given limited supply of components and exorbitant prices for components. But at least some people did say, oh, I better get in on that because GTA is coming. And specifically for PS5 Pro. It turns out I thought I was late. I was behind the curve. I should have bought a PS5 Pro prior to the price hike. Turns out I'm actually a trendsetter. Was this the GTA bump or was it. I don't know. But suddenly the PS5 Pro is sold out seemingly everywhere. And in fact, there is a hot resale market going on here where if I were not actually using my PS5 Pro, I could probably hawk that thing for a profit. So thank you, Steve, for alerting me to this so that I could feel a little bit better about my shameful gluttonous purchase of a PS5 Pro. I got to congratulate you on spending $200 more than the launch price, Ben. That's a really savvy move of you. Only to, you know, forego spending potentially $300 to $400 on the launch price when those eventually come back and stop. Look at it as an investment. Look at it as savings. Don't cry over spilt hundreds of dollars. Look at it as the hundreds of dollars I spent by looking forward to future price hikes. That's the way I'm looking at these things. Possibly flattering to me. I'm curious what Lewis thinks about, like, if they have, if you have any, like, consoles that are now an appreciating asset in your house. Is the base PS5 appreciating? I don't know. It might be. I think maybe a little. I appreciate it. And yes, this is really our retirement plan. You know, there's not much of a safety net when it comes to games media. There's not much else going on. Yeah. Yeah. It's a shrinking industry. So we're all just clinging to our increasingly expensive consoles, which we could potentially resell someday. Yeah. It has never been more fake, Ben. My PlayStation is going to be worth a lot. It has this little slot that you can put this weird, like, circle thing in. I don't know what it does. Wow. Some sort of primitive artifact or relic. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I plan to hand it down to my descendants because it may be generations until there's a PS6 at this point. So hopefully the PS5 Pro will have some shelf life. Now, one solution possibly to. A lack of new hardware is trying to make the old hardware perform better or trying to make old games look great. That is ostensibly at least the goal behind DLSS 5. This is what I was alluding to in the intro. This is, of course, the latest iteration of NVIDIA's upscaling, deep learning, super sampling series, which aims to prettify games after the fact. And this is a landmark release, DLSS 5. And obviously, this has been in the works for a while. We have discussed it in passing previously, but it's out now. It has escaped containment. There were people who were data mining it, but now it's really out there. And the response has been divisive, polarizing. It is available as of Thursday in NBA 2K27, if, of course, you have the proper NVIDIA hardware, which will. cost you an arm and a leg or a kidney. the GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs on GeForce Now. You can, if you dare, get access to DLSS 5. However, there are some downsides. One, it turns out that it will kill your frame rates. What are we doing here? Why? There are always trade-offs. What's the point? If there's no such thing as a free lunch or a free graphics upgrade. I'm sorry. I hate to cut you off. But like, even if this shit were to look good, like, does it at least perform well? No. Also no. God. And that's the other consideration. Does it look good? So we end up with uncanny valley yassifying of existing characters here. Because there are certain games, it appears to be maybe the more photorealistic the character was in the first place. The better the results, I put better in quotes, because again, this is all sort of subjective. However, if there's any actual stylized approach to rendering a character, you know, artistic intent, right? Then that all kind of comes out in the wash as this generic AI neural model filter is applied just in a very heavy handed way. This neural rendering based AI that supposedly is enhancing the lighting and the resolution and the surfaces and upscaling everything to 4K and all the rest of it. So, yeah, I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. to obtain the game Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom tie-in, on February 25th, 2026 for $69.99 from the PlayStation Store after Plaintiff 2 had obtained Resident Evil Requiem on February 14th, 2026, great Valentine's Day gift, Resident Evil, because the first plaintiff, not Sony, would have owned it then. So Sony is essentially saying that how could anyone think that someone was owning a digital game that they purchased? Because if that were the case, if people were actually owning the games that they buy, then the first person to purchase that game would have cornered the market and nobody else would be able to buy it because the first person did. So it's only one copy. It's like a once upon a time in Shaolin situation. It's Wu-Tang. There's only one copy. And once Martin Shkreli buys it, nobody else can. How do you guys, rate the defensibility of this argument? If you're presiding over court, are you holding Sony in contempt? Are you kicking them out of the courtroom? Are you saying, you know, actually, they might have a point here? What do you think, Lewis? It's almost like Sony isn't the producer of mass consumer electronics when they make that argument. I don't know. I think it's just incredibly disingenuous to argue that reasonable players don't think they are. They're entitled to at least some kind of ownership when they actually purchase something. I mean, I know it's not been that way for a long time, but like your average Joe doesn't. It is such a kind of like inside baseball argument that they're making. And also like the argument is kind of like, it's weird and esoteric and kind of like arcane. Like it's a hard thing to get your head around. I don't know. I don't know how you would expect anyone to kind of like, make the assumption that Sony thinks, thinks they should be making. Yes. Steve, what say you? I'm going to first hold myself in contempt for not going to law school in the first place, because to know that the like legal team of a multi-billion dollar international corporation is just throwing shit out there and being like, yeah, well, who does, who really owns anything, your honor? Quite frankly, you weren't even there. Like to know that I could have done that. And, you know, like, I'm very happy. For this job, but you know, not, not, not to be on Sony's payroll. Uh, no, this is stupid. And frankly, it's, if this were like a general consensus and the climate that we've had in the digital gaming space is we're like, well, more well-known, like 20 years on, like, obviously like the, the main consumption, like the main argument that like, uh, like contrarians of this would say is that like, Oh, well, the PC community has known this for, for so long. Like steam has been around for decades. And that's always been the case. We've known that this is what you ha what happens when you get digital games. Like they're just things that can be taken away from you at any point. It's only now recently that they're starting to get taken away from you. And people didn't know what that meant until just now. So now people need to have that level of conformed or informed consent when it comes to purchases and the California law that came here, which is basically like, I live in California presently. And whenever I buy something digitally on the PlayStation store, there's a big sign in my purchase price. Like you are not buying a item. You are buying a license to buy this game. Like it is very clearly stated. And even if that were to deter somebody from buying a digital copy, that's a level of informed consent that is quite frankly required nowadays, because we're seeing so many digital purchases from people. It might not be games at the moment, but it will be the case. Like we're seeing movies from people's libraries just disappear from the owners. Things are not being available to purchase because of rights and all these other things. Like, it's a level that like, again, like there's a level of grassroots, like consumerism that are trying to inform people of this, like this is happening around the internet constantly to inform people that this is happening. But from a like, big tobacco legal sense, like, yeah, you got to put the warning sign on the pack of cigarettes like you just got. Yes. Yeah. And at this phase, Sony is just trying to get this thing kicked into arbitration to avoid a class action so that they could handle this on an individual basis. So that's really what this is about for now. And they could just rely on, as you said, the messaging that is there, the disclosures that are there, some of which is upfront, some of which is buried in hundreds or thousands of words. agreements that no one actually looks at. Right. But this argument that they've tacked on to this feels like gilding the lily or hat on a hat or just and here's another argument that we cooked up that I want to know their billable hours. I want to know how much they're making to say this. Yes, I do love the idea that someone might think that a game is just one copy available for the world once someone snaps up. That's it. It's gone. Supplies are limited. It's fascinating. I mean, like I read that and I like two things popped into my mind immediately. The the ancient aliens meme of the guy just like looking insane. Yeah. And then the other thing that popped in my mind was what is that Billy Madison joke where they're like everything you have just said has made like the entire. It's like the hoops that they've jumped through and like that is their kind of like best offering legally is is just kind of mind blowing. Like, excuse me for believing perhaps that something purchased from a store in any sense, you know, transfers ownership and also just the concept of like them talking about like one. item being purchased, and then therefore after one person buys it, like, almost relating it to like physical stock when it's an entirely digital. It's just, it just makes your brain like, do so many hiccups. After trying to process it that it's like disarming in a way that it might actually be effective. Right? They can't possibly mean what they're saying. So they must have a better point buried under there somewhere. They need to rename the PlayStation store. If you're not actually. purchasing anything? Yes, the PlayStation leasing center Yeah, right. Can we still put things in our shopping carts? Or can we just carry them around for a little while before we put them down again? Yes, licensed now. There's also like a big, big level of concern that I have, because this is a level of like technological insight, and consumerism that I'm not sure, at least in this country in the United States, that the powers that be, like, congressionally or legally might actually not understand, like, how many times have we seen, like the CEOs of big tech companies being dragged out in front of Congress and then having to explain what an Instagram instant message is to an 80 year old man that doesn't even know how to use it. understand that you can send pictures on the internet. And to know that, like, oh, yeah, when you buy a thing on the internet, you actually don't buy it. Well, wait a minute, like, and like, to know that, like, we don't have the infrastructure of like, actually informing the people that make these decisions, what the wool being pulled from consumers eyes is actually saying, I think that's even more alarming, because in order for these lawyers to think about what they're saying, they're not going to be able to do anything about it. I think that they can get away with this, they got to actually read the room and know that the person that they're appealing this to might actually believe it. Yes, it might be a flood the zone strategy and stuff some techno babble or what will seem like techno babble to someone who does not play video games. Okay, we're throwing that argument out of court. The second one pertains to the tariff related price hikes, or Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo would say, possibly not tariff related price hikes, you can't prove that they're tariff related. So in July, Sony told investors that the company is going to be getting $508 million in refunds from the government. After those tariffs were ruled illegal. They also talked about a tariff fee of 200 million or so in the fall quarter, they told investors that is, when they actually raised the price of consoles, when Microsoft did, it cited market conditions and the rising costs of development. Sony, he cited a challenging economic environment. People could read between the lines, but they didn't directly say this is because of tariffs, at least in part, which is in part what their defense is resting on here. So this is maybe closer to credible, but are you buying the idea? Okay, so there's kind of a two pronged argument here. One is, well, one is that people paid what the list price was, and they got what was advertised. to them. And thus, they weren't screwed over here. There was no false advertising. Paying fair market price for voluntarily purchased consumer goods is not a legally cognizable injury. In fact, that's in some legal language. But as Microsoft said, there's nothing unjust about plaintiff purchasing an Xbox at an advertised price and getting exactly what he paid for, regardless of whatever theory he devised months later, about Microsoft's cost structure. And it went on. Also, plaintiff provides no specific allegations that would establish any pricing differential attributable to tariffs or suggest any possibility that Microsoft applied then or could recreate now any dollar for dollar calculation of tariff related pricing any more than it could any other market factor that affects pricing. So basically, A, nothing wrong with paying whatever the list price for the console was, even if it was higher than it was before you got the console that you thought you were getting for the price you knew you were paying. And secondly, even if you're aggrieved about that, you can't prove that we raise prices because of tariffs and that you are then entitled to refunds when we get refunds for tariffs. Steve, you buy in this one, you let in this argument stand. I now no longer wish to have gone to law school. This is the type of stuff that where I'm like, OK, so this is what the good lawyers do, because, yeah, like in the surface of all of that legal word salad, I pretty much get it. Like if somebody. If somebody sees the price and buys a thing based on that price and the company does not disclose what why they raised the price or lowered it, what do I know? Like, what are they to say? I suppose that that's like defensible for sure. Like, you can't really like you don't really have a leg to stand on if you like check like we're the one that saw the price. I don't know. Like, it's still maddening. I hate law. I hate everything. That this has come to law for the time where don't you don't you yearn for the time when you didn't know what the Strait of Hormuz was and we didn't have to know about tariffs and everything like wasn't that a great time. And now we have to learn about this every other day. That's what that's my thoughts, man. Yeah. This one worked for you, Lewis. I mean, like legally, like, I don't know, whatever. It's obviously I mean, it's smarter than. Last argument is less dumb is more morally reprehensible, maybe. I don't know. Or at least of a piece with it. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it obviously kind of stinks, but I kind of like I buy it. It holds a little more water. We all we all know what's happening here. And yet I get it. Yes. If you charged us a certain amount and we agreed to pay it, then you could argue, as they are, that we're not entitled to then getting a refund, even if that was one of us. And that's one of the reasons why the price was what it was. I think the cleverest part of the defense was that Sony essentially argued that, you know, that the price hike couldn't be solely attributable to tariffs because they raise prices again later. And that was not because of tariffs, because the tariffs had been repealed or there had been no new tariffs. And thus, if they were hiking prices again, then that actually strengthens their argument. So, yeah, you know, I'm going to lose my mind. I'm going. It was a nifty legal strategy to hike the prices of the consoles again so that they could then say that, see, we weren't raising prices solely because of that, which obviously is true. We were just talking about the rampocalypse and Ramageddon and all the rest. And obviously there is a component shortage and components cost more. And that is a big part of why hardware prices have gone up across the board. So that is true, obviously, to an extent. And maybe it's tough to decouple that from the tariffs. But I did enjoy doubling down because we can't give you refunds for one price hike because we did this other price hike and charge you even more. I'm going to set this office building on fire. Anybody listening, I'm legally not doing that. I'm not doing that. I'm actually not doing that. This is a sad time. And just the argument that, like, we didn't raise the price because of tariffs. We raised the price because we were just. Just being shitty is kind of it holds water, though. I didn't expect any of these companies to refund tariff costs to the consumers, especially not Microsoft, who is laying off thousands of people and scrambling. And it's what I think it's within their right to not refund after, you know, you make an agreed purchase. But at the same time, like, it certainly would go a long way for for, you know, what you think of one of these companies if they did. And I say. As someone who did buy a play date last year and might possibly be the only person, you know, to have received a tariff refund in the in the sum of twenty three dollars and forty eight cents. All right. Money bags. Put that toward the PS5 Pro that is not available anymore. Now that that ship has sailed and only a fool would do that. Are you saying that these corporations should appeal to consumers to ensure good faith? You think that's going to happen? Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. The bigger the corporation, you know, the more you can trust them. That's what I like. I would like my happy meal, too. Yeah. Well, they have us where they want us, or at least console sickos like me. And we will happily lap up the slot and pay whatever prices are charged. the larger golden age of Capcom. But just talking about this game in isolation for a second, how much did you enjoy Onimusha Way of the Sword? Well, I haven't finished it yet. I'm still playing it. It is a lengthy game. I would say I'm greatly enjoying it. It is funnier than I was expecting. It is. Shockingly funny. Yeah, absolutely. The first 10 minutes is brilliant. I was going to say, this is one of the best openings of a video game in recent memory. Obviously, I was excited for this game, but I was completely sold on the characters and the setting and the tone and the writing and the voice acting, which, by the way, the English voice acting is excellent, too. It is. It's really good. Oh, yeah. Nice. As is Japanese and, you know, presumably many other languages. But yes, even playing it with the English voices, it's really good. And yeah, strong start. I was immediately in on just the whole vibe of this game. Yeah, yeah. Strong start. And then, I mean, it's just, look, the sword play is some of the best ever, I think. I think I played a lot of like samurai games, sword fighting games on the PS2. That was my first console. I think I played way of the samurai. And I was like vaguely familiar with like Bushido Blade. Yeah. When are we bringing back Bushido Blade? That's what I'm wondering. But it was always like this, like that kind of samurai sword play was always like this kind of like, in my mind, this kind of like holy grail of kind of video game experience that designers could aim for. But it always just kind of felt so undercooked on the PS2. And like, obviously, like you've got Devil May Cry that has its own kind of like melee combat thing going on. Even the original. Even the original Onimusha games, it's often just like you're kind of like carving through enemies, through that kind of like flesh. But like way of the sword, the sword, it lives up to its name. Like that sword play is just like, it really feels like they've kind of like made good on the promise of kind of like virtual sword play. You've got like the simulated sword physics. You've got the varied terrain. And like, I'm not, I'm not much of a boss fight guy. But man, he's great. Bosses are good. It's bad news for you in this game. But they're so good. They're so good. Oh, yeah. I'm having a great time with it. Yeah. The way that the sword animations are really tailored to each fight, where you really are getting blade on blade and steel on steel. And it's not just kind of fudging it. It's a testament to the animations, which are great in combat and also in the copious cut scenes. There are a lot of cut scenes and some of them are quite lengthy, which you won't mind because they're occasional. Again, well acted and animated and written. But nonetheless, this, it reminded me almost of, you know, when the skill stick was introduced to the NHL series. I think it was NHL 07. I know, kind of a strange comp. But it was like. That was, that was hated back in the day. I remember that. They were wrong, though. They were wrong. It changed hockey games forever. Yes, because suddenly you were actually controlling the stick yourself. It wasn't just a single button press. Now, that's not exactly analogous to what. We're talking about here because you are still sort of pressing a button for light attack and heavy attack. It's like, hey, we played skate. Why don't we put that in hockey game? Yeah, it's it's not like this is for honor or even kingdom come deliverance to or something. It's not exactly, you know, some sort of realistic sword fighting simulator. But it reminded me of the skill stick innovation, just in the sense that you do actually feel like it's not just a generic fight. Each exchange feels. Like a specific fight because your sword is actually clashing with someone else's sword. And there is a real weight and heft to that. So, Matt, you actually have finished the game because, of course, you have. So give us your your full impressions on the combat and everything else. Well, I want to touch on the combat that you're just mentioning. I think that the reason why the combat is so successful and in my mind is is the real shining star of this. Game for you to isolate it down to one thing. It's the combat. It has the right number of systems in it. Right. You play a lot of games where you have a weak attack, a strong attack, and you can power your dodge. Right. And this adds in a bunch of different elements. You can get into a clash where you have to tap the button faster to kind of, you know, overpower the enemy. There's there's one situation where if you it'll kind of clash swords. And then. If you press the other attack other than the one the opposite of the head, you attacked with a little hint, you switch to a light and then you successfully win that interaction. Or if you attach with a light, you have to switch to a heavy and, you know, dodges on top of that typical parry. And then they have, you know, those there's an attack also where instead of trying to parry or trying to dodge, if you attack right when someone else is attacking and you get that timing very precise, you can do it. A particularly devastating attack. So there's all these these systems that make it so that that that sword gameplay is is constantly, you know, you're on the edge of your seat jumping between all of these possible interactions rather than just tapping the button, like dodging. Right. The fights become inherently more interesting just because of those few little systems added to it. And you get into a flow state or hopefully you do. And you you just get so locked in. Because you have to watch the animations to see what kind of attack is coming. And obviously, there are some visual indicators and little glints and color coded indications. But a lot of it is just sort of being in the moment and watching what your opponent is doing. And it's so gratifying when you actually can escape from a fight unscathed or by the skin of your teeth. And yes, you have the Eason attacks, which are foregoing a block or a parry or a counter and just attacking. But at the. Very last attacking the attack. Yeah. Yeah. And it's so satisfying. And we've we've talked about how everything is parries these days. Every game seemingly attacks is parries now. Attacks are parries. Love it. Attacks are parries too, baby. It's parries all the way down. But but when it's done as well as as this, then it feels distinctive in a way that something like Beast of Reincarnation, which you enjoyed, Matt. I was a little less impressed. There are dozens of us. Yes. This just. Feels it's on another. Obviously, it is. Yes. And it has to be because it's a 40 hour game. And because you're you're going to be doing so much combat that if it got old, then that would be bad. And that's that's kind of what I wanted to talk about here, because I have like mixed emotions about this game because the combat is so outstanding, because the art direction is so incredible, because the performance of the main character is so memorable. The shortcut. The game is so good. And I think the shortcomings of this game like frustrate me to a degree that is a little bit unreasonable because of how much I love so much of this game. And you mentioned a 40 hour game. Yeah, that's that's one of my bigger frustrations is that this game feels to me like it is stretched out to an unnecessary degree. And in a year where we've had Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata be absolute bangers. That both sort of clocked in under 20 hours and to me felt like perfectly paced. This kind of felt bloated. And it's a good thing, as you mentioned, Lewis, that the boss fights are so outstanding because the majority of them you're asked to do multiple times. And without spoiling anything, right by the end of the game, you're going to fight even more bosses again. And there's a mode in this game where you can choose to refight some of the bosses. To unlock some cosmetics. And let me tell you, you don't need to do that because you're going to be fighting these bosses again anyway. And you really don't need to make yourself any more familiar with them. Another thing it has in common with Beast of Reincarnation. Lots of reincarnated and recycled enemies and attacks. So that was really my main frustration with the game. Is just that I felt like at half to two thirds. The run time, this could have been just an absolute all timer and instead by the end I was I was very ready to be done with it, which which is something I could not have fathomed that I would feel after, you know, nine hours in when you when you really can can tell that this combat is is really something special and the characters rule and the setting is awesome. And so, yeah, that's kind of where I. I don't think that Capcom is entirely worried about the like bang for your buck, like hours played versus cost of cost to entry type of argument with these games. I think it might have just been like a like I hate to say pacing error or something because like they knew that they had something great and they had so many things that they wanted to emphasize and show the player again, because not only is it like a wonderful exercise in art direction. And like level design and and puzzling, but like it feels like that there's like a level of these developers wanting to emphasize the work that they put in and to a degree, I very much respect that. But it does, to your point, feel like it's hindering the thing that like it gets in its own way as far as your enthusiasm for it goes, because I started this game vibrating with how great everything is. It's being. Shown to me. And then when I get into the groove of like, okay, well, we are in this sort of like mini. hub area where we go and tackle different tasks and fight certain enemies and do little like uh not like platforming environment puzzle and then kind of rinse repeat for like another five hours and then you go to the next section that's where i'm like oh okay this might be a bit of a step back but i really want to like i think to me like you say the comment and that it is exceptional i i really cannot emphasize to me how blown away i was with not even so much the story but i think the like incredible performance and tone that this game set with its narrative because games often take themselves way too seriously especially games like this where like you're a lone samurai fighting demons and it's all about my destiny whatever the hell and like reading into what capcom's philosophy was to want to get the rights to mishiro mifune's likeness because of what he means to samurai stories and what he means to characters like this i truly think that they had a measured service that they wanted to give not only the characters in this story but the actual man himself that played these characters something of a great personality because i was stunned at like the level of attention that they had to establishing a level of lived in like character affect when it came to musashi and i kind of haven't experienced that in games ever maybe i i don't i don't know lewis were you like as struck with me or am i like talking crazy no no no i love this there's a kind of like one detail that um that the protagonist does uh in the in the kind of like uh animation with his like jaw he's constantly just like chewing over his jaw and stuff like that and it's just like yeah it feels like a really um it feels like the kind of like tick like you an actor might play with in an actual kind of like movie but they've like done it in a in a video game um yeah i think it's really cool they have imported some of mifune's mannerisms and have done that with the consent of the family and the estate and obviously lots of love and and care and attention to detail and everything and it is just such a gratefully realized character that i enjoyed spending time with could it have been a little less time yes perhaps not so much because of the story or the characters but because of some of the repetitive gameplay as good as it was i do think that a little less would have been more and i'm always trying to put myself in the shoes of the players and our listeners who are not necessarily having to blow through games as fast as possible because there's another podcast coming next week and three more great games are coming out but everyone is dealing with that deluge to some extent there were 700 games released on steam last week a lot of it is is slopped but nonetheless there are a lot of great games these days but you will not regret your your time with onimusha way of the sword and it's impressive that they resurrected and rehabilitated this franchise but it's not as if you needed to know anything about onimusha or you needed to have some pre-existing attachment it's a it's a fresh start for the franchise in every way and they could have called it a brand new franchise but it's not as if you needed to know anything about onimusha or you needed to have a brand new ip the way that pragmata was a new ip and it would have been just fine right so there's a little nostalgia for for those of us who are old enough to remember but it's a it's really impressive and that's just kind of what we've come to expect from capcom at this point so i i feel almost blasé about it oh yeah another really good capcom game if i had to rank those three major capcom releases of this year this one might be third but only because the first two were so great and we like them so much i probably would put this below pragmata and requiem but it's wild to think that that could be true because i i've loved onimusha so much i was waiting for this game this franchise to come back for so long and it's really like capcom's doing the money phone at this point because it like to know that this is their like third best game that came out is nuts because anybody like their their b-sides are that are other people's they might be fourth if we're being if we're being honest all right okay all right i have not gone through monster hunter stories 3 yet but uh i've played some of it and it's also fantastic yeah it's like when people listen to the master plan and say you got to listen to the oasis b-sides man better than the albums right but it's it's like that with capcom it's like you know you can stop the cap you can't stop capcom nothing can stop capcom at this point and i i want to ask you about that lewis one little tip i will pass along at least for me i found that changing the control scheme helped because it it defaults to this aggressive i think it's called control steam and i i switched it to the defensive oh defensive is way better which is what's the difference i thought so defensive is where you parry with l1 or block is just an l1 and right and as opposed to the face the face buttons yeah it needs to be um on on l1 or yes i found that extremely unintuitive and i was trying to learn it that default way because i usually go with the default but i just i couldn't get that down and then that sort of messed me up for another hour or two because i was then unlearning what i had learned with the initial control scheme but this is why capcoms might be the greatest to ever do it because i used to never like go in and look at different control schemes i always assumed that like when i start the game the control scheme that the developers make for me at the start is the one that they intended to do but instead at the beginning of this game they're like hey pick a control scheme right now and to me i was like what the fuck are you talking about why would i have to pick a control scheme it really is just where the parry button is yeah like and it made me like sit down and look and i'm like okay this is the circle button for this one this is the circle button for this one like i looked at like i cross reference every button and it gives me like an already like a palette for how i think i'm going to play this game and i'm like okay i'm going to play this game and i'm going to play this game and along with all of the great systems in this combat that they introduced to us it drip feeds you so well because all the things that we talk about like we've seen in other character action games like this exists in bayonetta this exists to a degree in uh devil may cry but the way in which this is slowly introduced to you at a consistent speed to where oh hey we're going to give you like a not button mash mashing quality where like if you clash your sword with an enemy you have to hit the opposite button and it will make sense to you and you'll remember to do that for the rest of your playthrough like that that is like incredible game design and that's perfect for what capcom is like destined and put on this earth to do yes so capcom is is now wrapping up this masterful year perhaps a career year in a very lengthy career that dates back to the early 80s some on our network might call this capcom's apex mountain it's a re-apexing for capcom i don't know it depends on how you define it it's had so many successful eras but it also had a lull and a stagnation the so-called crapcom era of maybe the late 2000s to mid 2010s or so and now they're in what people have labeled the cap god era where they just seem to have unlocked some kind of cheat code here it's like when you lower onimusha's it tells you which buttons to press and it kind of seems as if capcom has just lowered the difficulty of game development not actually of course because making games is still hard and even capcom sometimes has its difficulties as it did with pragmata which took several years to come together but nonetheless you look at the results and it's so impressive and we had a little table in your piece lewis where we just sort of split the last 20 years into not entirely arbitrarily we were using resident evil 7 which is seen as something of a turning point as the dividing line prior to that 27 to 2016 the average metacritic score of an original capcom release was around 70 since then it's been 83 this is just par for the course that capcom releases are onimusha way of the sword quality and as the quality has increased the quantity has decreased perhaps that's not a coincidence though obviously they're still putting in the work putting out games at a fairly regular pace here so we all can look at this and say wow capcom's on an incredible generational run here across new ip like pragmata across old ip like street fighter ip that's taken the leap like monster hunter dragon's dogma resident evil of course what did you learn from speaking to producers inside capcom including onimusha's and also industry analysts about how they approach the game and how they approach the game and how they approach the game i've done this and what if anything any other companies can learn from the success i guess kawata the producer long-time producer avari uh requiem pragmata i think he joined the company in like 1995 so he has been there for a for a good old stint but he was quite i mean he was like pretty candid he was he's kind of like we were talking about like well how how how has capcom gone on this kind of generational run and it's like okay well first of all there's not there's And then second, he like i have just i failed a lot and he was quite open about that obviously i asked him to name specific failures um and maybe i kind of like respect to his his colleagues he said um that there were too many to name but i mean he's obviously i think he's obviously he's partly is like referring to those kind of like crap com stinker years when it was outsourcing so much of its development to international studios to yeah there were some like creative highs like the uh the ninja fairy dmc devil may cry is a great game even though it was like divisive um at the time but then there's like dark void which i can't remember the meta critics core off the top of my head but it's it's not good who can forget dark boy yeah right yeah it was i suppose kind of like bringing bringing development back home to japan um twinned with the re engine um really kind of like set the stage for this you know it's like this new golden age i guess yeah and i was thinking okay is this replicable is this applicable can anyone look at capcom and say oh let's just do that yeah and it's difficult obviously for any number of reasons this is a a big company with a long history and a lot of beloved ip that people are really attached to and they can just reach into their back catalog and pull out onimusha and resurrect that right not everyone can do that so it's it's almost nintendo-esque in the tenure also the richness of the library also the intergenerational developmental model which you wrote about in your piece kind of passing the baton from old to new which is enabled in part by the fact that there is more continuity in game development in japan partly perhaps because there's an emphasis and a prioritization of that but also because the labor laws support that and make it harder to lay people off and so that's a big part of it too boy so the conditions employment laws yes you probably would not quite have a bit reactor situation if that's located elsewhere i feel like you also wouldn't get that element of ownership of one's failings as well like the the amount of like reference that he that he had for his work in those in those down and out years like it feel it feels a lot more personal because of the fact that a he's been like allowed to be with the company for so long and like dedicated his efforts to writing the ship like that like it's actually it's actually kind of beautiful yeah and it's an exciting new era because not only do you have a new mainline megaman coming next year right for the 40th anniversary of that franchise but you also now have this move into adaptations we've got zach crager's resident evil movie coming later this month which we'll be covering on but can't wait you've got the street fighter movie coming next month which i'm also i can wait i can wait you know i can wait a little longer and we will because it's coming out next month but it looks pretty darn good too you know what if it's better than mortal combat i'll be happy it could be dumb and fun it could be dumb and fun and that's fine and you have the devil may cry animated adaptation which seemed to boost sales of the back catalog and that's the thing they have perfectly nailed this formula of we'll keep making and remastering and re-releasing your old favorites but then we will also keep making new installments of those old beloved series which innovate in some way they're not purely just yes here's the game you love but we're also taking this in a slightly new direction or at least synthesizing multiple directions as in the case of requiem and then still finding time to resurrect a long dormant series like onimusha or do something entirely new like pragmata which you know i just read a stat about how something like six or seven percent of sales or play time these days is original games and it's it's demoralizing right because people are playing the same games over and over and if not the same games at least the same series and sequels but capcom has shown that making sequels doesn't mean that the series is stagnant that you can do things new within the old framework but then also saying yeah look we have pragmata here which was this brilliant synthesis of you know kind of typical capcom action there's a core capcom game but riffing on that formula and then just delivering hey this is about like a quick time event kind of combined with combat it's sort of a simple hook and yet it's so fun and so distinctive so they're just firing on all cylinders right now and it's it's really impressive i was struck by the comparison to obsidian as i was reading your piece of this because obsidian released three games last year and that was not by design and seemingly didn't go great obsidian released avowed grounded two and the outer worlds two last year and at least a couple of those underperformed and then subsequently there were a lot of layoffs at obsidian as part of the xbox downsizing and that seemed to have been well we didn't plan on this it just kind of happened that way which is sort of the case for capcom because pragmata did take longer than they anticipated but it didn't feel like these games cannibalized each other's audiences in any way at least the first two were quite successful they were all well received it it felt like there was a a plan or at least all these games were given the time that they deserved and and were polished to near perfection and it's it's really something you know it it reminds me of on 30 rock when jack donaghy is having a perfect day where he makes absolutely no mistakes and he he refers to it as reaganing capcom is reaganing right now and i keep thinking surely capcom can't keep getting away with this and there's going to be a dud at some point and they will because no one is is perfect forever but we're talking about 10 years now of just high after high and even if it's it's tough for someone to emulate i'm glad capcom has found this formula at least because uh it's a nice exception from the doom and gloom that we're so often talking about elsewhere in the industry you i'd encourage everyone to check out lewis's piece which uh dives pretty deep into all of this and and get some good behind the scenes stories and anecdotes from the principals at capcom and we could just wrap up briefly with a couple quick recommendations wanted to shout out orbitals which is out this week a switch to exclusive which matt and i played together lewis also played independently lewis is going to be involved with a an unannounced upcoming project from the publisher of this game kepler interactive just to disclose that but uh also i think genuinely enjoyed this game this is developed by shape farm a new studio published by kepler and the hook is essentially what if hazelight but anime and 80s anime specifically and so even though this was the first time i've played this game i've never played it before i've never played it before i've never played it before i've never played it before i've never played it before i've never played it before it was almost co-developed behind studio mascot the anime studio behind a lot of favorites and just going back to ogs from that era and gundam animators and it it really has that incredible look it's also directed or co-directed by jacob lundgren who is a hazelight veteran and worked on all the hazelight games it takes to a way out split fiction so clearly both of those legacies and lineages are going to be part of the game and i think it's going to be a great game and i think these are are reflected very strongly here so matt uh this was a nice change of pace in that it's a six to eight hour game so if you need a little quick palate cleanser before you dive into new game plus for onimusha way of the sword or the even harder difficulty that you unlock after you finish the game then this is a quick little digestible co-op only adventure what did you think of the game i think that's fitting too for for a co-op experience uh you know you don't have 40 hours of hang time with friends usually especially as an adult um uh i i i have some some mixed opinions about orbitals overall i i think it's great i think that the art style is is just mind-blowing and and that it's a it's a real achievement visually um and stylistically i think that like the tonally they they nailed what they were going for and anyone who this art style remotely appeals to i think should check this game out um i did have some minor qualms with it i i i thought that some of the puzzles were better than others by a good amount i i think at times legible than others to legibility is is really it and i think that's sort of hand in hand with with this art style being so distinct it is that it can be hard at times to kind of extract visual information from it uh you know speaking of capcom there's no yellow paint in this game uh however there are some sections but how will i climb they do have yellow handles i will say that so don't worry about that but yeah just some of the some of the some of the puzzles the the sort of objective of what you are supposed to be doing either visually or logically isn't all that clear so they could there are occasional frustration points um and then the the the the the the the the the the the The only other significant, uh, critique i have is is it's something that will be irrelevant to all of our listeners so i'll only touch on it very briefly but we got yeah we got one review code for this and then ben you're able to use game share to uh to let me play through the internet yes much like split fiction only one player has to own a copy or should i say perhaps digitally purchase a license yes to retain the license much better much better yes you just want to you know obviously not confuse anyone yes um and then the other person can play with you online yes yeah that experience was bad uh because the delay input was at a level that that made it very frustrating for me but that won't be a problem for any of you because they have released an orbitals sort of companion app that you can install on your switch to and so you will then have the game sort of locally even though you can't add the game to your switch to your switch to your switch to your switch to your access it without your friend who owns that license uh connecting with you um so basically what i experienced that input delay of game share no one will have to go through you've just installed a companion app which i finally got to do mere hours before we started talking about it and what a difference it made for the feel of the game and i'm so glad i got to do that because i played through the entire game uh just feeling like this can't be what it feels like and thankfully it wasn't it it does feel very responsive and man that was a weird review experience uh and i'll stop talking about it now because it's as i said completely irrelevant or it could be although it may be confusing to people that they don't have to do game share this was my first game maybe people maybe people will be using game share instead of getting the companion app that that lets your switch process it locally if you can get the orbitals global friends pass app then do that and i'll stop talking about it now because it's as i said download the game game share can be handy in some situations this was my first time playing a full game that way and i would not really recommend it because of yes some lag it didn't affect me so much as thankfully ben knew that i was better than my performance in the game right indicated grading on a curve but uh yeah the the interface you know it's not true full screen and game share and it's it's not going to be quite the fidelity and frame rate and everything and input responsiveness that you're used to but go get the friends pass or you could play it locally in co-op or multiple people could buy it there are many ways to play but you know it will remind you of of split fiction in a lot of respects but with its own distinctive style and look lewis i know you were impressed by the story and and the world building i i do think the setting is is quite cool there was a moment toward the end when we were watching the final cut scene where matt and i both thought simultaneously and then said i don't really know what's going on in this game there was a lot of story and it's like i'm kind of lost the plot a little bit here but i'm enjoying the the look and the vials great yes exactly the boss fights there are some exceptional boss fights in this game as well there are some good some of my favorite moments from orbitals and onimusha yes so i i think it nails the the look and sensibility that it is going for here and doesn't overstay its welcome and definitely reminiscent of or derivative of split fiction and and hazelight games but that's not the worst thing in the world i'm happy to have more games like that because i do tend to enjoy them and overall the reviews have been pretty positive obviously there there have been varying opinions i meant to mention by the way when it came to capcom there was an ign 10 that has taken some flack this was by will burger whom you talked to for your piece and i just want to say because whenever anyone goes out on a limb like that they take a ton of abuse right maybe even more so when they go low than high but either way you stand out you put your neck on the line and people are going to try to chop it off and there was some discussion about that this week in particular because thomas mauler who's uh the lead developer on the ori games and and no rest for the wicked which is coming out soon he just made a a presumably vibe coded alternative to open critic and metacritic called video games critic and this is sort of a reactionary attention seeking guy and very much on the the corner of you know games media is biased or dumb or whatever and so this is partly about uh empowering the player and the user reviews and everything which i don't really get because you can look at user reviews everywhere already so i don't really know why we need to blend them the one good point i thought it had was that it does kind of update the review score based on the user reviews after the release because as we've discussed games sometimes get a lot better after the initial release but those initial review scores are frozen in time forever which can be a bit misleading but beyond that the whole goal seems to be to compare outlets to the crowd and to say that it's it's a good to match everyone else's opinion and look i i find utility in review aggregators and i sometimes let them guide my buying decisions or playing or watching or reading decisions but i think that's kind of a wrong-headed take to think that the review score is frozen in time forever which can be a bit misleading but beyond that the goal of reviews should be to mirror everyone's opinion and for everyone to have sort of a hive mind opinion of games because i just i want to defend the outlier reviews here i don't think onimusha is a 10 it's not a 10 for me but if it's a 10 for will and he feels that way then by all means express that no it's it's tough when you have scored reviews this is why a lot of outlets have moved away from that because a 10 implies perfection right as if they're there there could be no improving upon this and and that's hard to defend i think but obviously will really love this game and it really resonated with him and i would hate for that sort of standing up and saying i think this game is great or i think this game is not great and then weathering whatever criticism that comes your way i would hate if we lost that you know because review aggregators aren't as useful if everyone is just hurting and clustering and fearful and engaging in groupthink or just trying to project what other people will think as opposed to it being an actual genuine reflection of what a group of reviewers thought themselves independently so i'm all for the outlier review score high or low as long as you truly believe it and you stand by it and there can be competing pressures right because it's the internet there can be the the pressure to stand out so that you attract attention in kind of a trollish just trying to get traffic way and then there can be the competing pressure of not wanting to stand out because everyone will pile on if you do anything different so i just want to say you know it's not a 10 for me but i will i will defend to the death will's rights to say it's a 10 for him you know yeah and and you know also it's like people will then hold that against the outlet and say oh ign gave a 10 to this but ign also gave a 10 to that and there are many people right i mean this happens sometimes at the rigor where we have different opinions about things there's not a house opinion about everything and uh we want a diversity of viewpoints and so it's not consistent across the board you know it's not if someone thinks this is a 10 that they're grading that in relation to everything else anyway that's my little rant i'm sorry i just had to get that off my chest question for the panel quick question for the panel is is the internet discourse reaction to the ign 10 the start of the death of media literacy or is it something else no it's definitely not the start it's the end of of that maybe look we wouldn't be here if everyone liked crimson desert okay to reviews right if margarita time came out today they'd still give it a no yeah that was one of my favorite discussions on this podcast when we really disagreed about crimson desert and uh and we each came to our opinions honestly so yeah look i mean as as members of games media it's nice that anyone is paying attention to what anyone in games media is saying these days so i'll take it i guess but i don't think too many people are maybe taking too much weight on certain games media yeah perhaps so look there's a lot of kind of bad faith discussion of this stuff but uh that's that's my spiel about outlier review scores so orbitals we we give at least a qualified recommendation to yep it's 40 bucks split it with a friend 20 each right time we give a a wholehearted recommendation to and do you matt and lewis want to give just a a brief parting recommendation for another new game that you somehow found time to play the wordy title resonance a plague tale legacy which is a a prequel to a plague tale innocence and the third installment in the a plague tale series so this is available for all non-switch platforms onimusha and orbitals is available for switch to only but yeah give us uh your your quick takes on resonance lewis what did you think i had a good time with it it is incredibly derivative of the last 15 years of action adventure games okay there is a lot of handholdy kind of platforming but the setting is absolutely sumptuous and the characters pelling uh i think i think the lead is called sophia who's like it's what i mean it's obviously it's walking the same path that tomb raider has walked uncharted has walked and then within the game there is this kind of like set up that she is actually walking within the footsteps of a kind of like minoan soldier as well it's set on a on a um on a greek island uh crete i think but that's a kind of like nifty way of of it kind of like justifying what it's doing from a kind of like gameplay and narrative perspective i had a good time with it it was nice actually it was nice being on crete in a kind of like greek mythological kind of like setting and it not be this kind of like the the dour machismo of um of nolan's odyssey it was kind of like refreshing refreshing in that way oh a spicier one now wow all right hey i just defended outlier reviews so thank you lewis for living up to that matt you second that more or less i i do i i have my sentiments are almost exactly the same i i i think there's some you know the the gameplay is is is nothing particularly noteworthy i would say they they they do a decent job of pacing the different types of gameplay that you'll find in here there's sort of like a stealth section there's obviously combat exploration puzzles um and i think those are well paced but really the star of the show here is the visuals is the the atmosphere um if you're someone who's particularly affected by by feeling like you're really transporting into a space in video games i i think that this game does a fantastic job i i was constantly just stopping to admire the setting um i think the voice acting's pretty great uh it's it's about a 10 to 12 hour experience um some of the puzzles i found pretty enjoyable the combat was satisfying enough uh i think towards the end the the story maybe dragged a bit for me there's a yeah me too there's there's a there's a lot of oh i can't deal with this anymore from the main character that i could i was like can i just let me run i let me run forward now please thank you so just like the very back end of it was a little a little tedious you are always running forward in that game yeah i would like to trust the w key now yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but yeah i i i got the same thing i i i enjoyed my time with it very much and and and it's its strengths are are are worth seeing in my opinion and i i felt there were very few negative points to it as well so and again if that had been twice its length i probably wouldn't have finished it but i yeah i thought it hit right at that right at its its perfect length well we will continue to press the sprint button to try to speed run this late summer rush of releases we have not yet gotten to mortal shell 2 i know you played and liked the demo matt we did not get access to the blood of don walker early enough to talk about that this week that's the new vampire themed action rpg from some of the games that we've been playing so we're going to talk about the makers of the witcher 3 seems like people are liking it despite it being a bit rough around the edges on pc i know who would have ever expected that from some of the makers of the witcher this is more of a minor thing but apparently it does have that beast of reincarnation issue of the subtitles being too small and not customizable this happens on so many games i assume because the qa folks are sitting too close to massive screens or something i'm considering starting a side business where i become a games accessibility consultant on a single issue subtitles and studios just hire me to come in and say hey have you considered making the subtitles a bit bigger i might move into that area if my media career goes belly up and of course next week we will fully focus our attention on marvel's wolverine so looking forward to that conversation as well so many games so little time and we are just trying to keep up with this boss rush and live to tell the tale and podcast about the tale and you can of course contact button dash at ringerverse gaming at ringerverse gaming at gmail.com we will enjoy and read your emails this week's email that i will surface for you is a response to our prompt on our zero company pod where we ask for pitches for original star wars games the likes of which we haven't seen before got a good email from listener amjad who said i heard your call for star wars game ideas and the following immediately came to mind a hitman style game in which you play as one of the six bounty hunters darth vader assembled in the empire strikes back each bounty hunter has their own pros and cons yeah shout out forlam and zuckus no disintegration no yeah we had star wars bounty hunter but that's not exactly what what the pitch is here i love they have their own pros and cons specialties skill trees you choose a bounty hunter and a large map with an intended bounty like the hitman games each map presents an extraordinary amount of choices and options and possibilities for how you capture exfiltrate or kill your bounty and the wealth of replayability from the large maps and environments you can play as one of the six bounty hunters it's further expanded by the variation in characters you can play as any of the six bounty hunters and their respective features tell me with a straight face that wouldn't sell a bazillion copies i couldn't possibly thank you for the suggestion that's a free ip for anyone out there if you can get the star wars license and it's uh kind of gels with a suggestion i had which i meant to make though i don't think i did i'd like to see a star wars immersive sim give me a a prey deus ex dishonored style star wars game set in that universe and just go whole hog i'd be extremely into that and i'm always into getting emails again send them to ringiversegaming at gmail.com matt and steve thanks as always for joining me thanks ben and lewis thanks so much for coming on i hope to have you back but uh for now i'd encourage everyone to go read lewis's capcom piece which we will link to it is well worth your time so thanks for your effort on that lewis and also for making this possible hey my pleasure pleased to be here thanks as always to devin ronaldo for producing this podcast and to arjuna ramgopal for his senior podcast management but mash will be back next week labor day savings are happening now at the home depot with select appliances starting at $399 plus save up to an extra thousand dollars and get free delivery on 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