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Voice actor extraordinaire, all round good egg, and fellow Lock-On backer Morgan joined us to talk doing homework to get TV time, the world and characters of Sekiro, and the trouble with homework and American TV.

Here's a sample of the full show notes - make sure to click through and check them out.

Content Warning

There were a few swears in this episode, but we've bleeped them all - bleeps are funnier than swears anyway - We've thrown the trigger warning claxon in at the following timestamps, as the subjects we talk about could be a upsetting to some listeners:

Check your podcatcher for chapter markings which will help you to skip these sections, should you wish.

Please listen responsibly.

Show Notes

Even though Squidge is very special - and I'm sure you'll all agree that he is, indeed very special - our guest for this episode was Morgan Ritson. Morgan describes himself as:

When introducing himself, we have a conversation about how we should always be positive around each other. We use the example of Morgan being told that his ability to write things down wasn't great, and how one of my professors at university has dyslexia and dyspraxia, but both are great people who are achieving great things - please don't tell someone that they can't do something because they are x, have y, or don't have z. Just be positive to them, and support them if you can

One thing to note: because of the gap in our schedule - as explained in The Lookback: July 2021 - we had recorded this episode quite some time ago.

But after that, we wasted almost no time getting to one of Jay's favourite topics:

Recent Games

The Recent Games segment will not be new to listeners, but in case you're new to the show here's how it goes: we go round the table and discuss one or more games that we've been playing recently, and whether we think it's worth the listeners checking it out. We continue to do this until we've run out of games to discuss.

And, of course, we shared ours too. Would we recommend the games that we've all been playing? Or course!

Morgan's Recent Games

As is tradition, we asked our guest to go first.

Morgan tells us that he is drawn to games which are greater than just person-vs-person, and the first game on his list is one such game. Both Sekiro and Bloodborne as spiritual off-shoots of Dark Souls, with one (Bloodborne) being more about taking the next step as humans, whereas the other (Sekiro) being more grounded in traditional Japanese mythology and being related to fighting for what you care about.

And this lead us into ta discussion on how there aren't many games - or books and films, for that matter - which explore the stories of the foot-shoulder who has never had to fight before, and how this isn't THEIR war but that of someone else's.

And the discussion on interesting characters leads us to a conversation about how villains have the potential to be much more interesting than heroes. The examples we used are Xande (from Final Fantasy III) and Hans Gruber - these two villains are arguably more interesting than the heroes who oppose them.

This lead us into a discussion with Morgan about how he's looking to pen an article for Lost in Cult's Lock-On series of journals - we've interviewed Jon and Jason from LiC about Lock-On previously; here's a link to that

We talk about the Final Fantasy games a lot - and not just when Lulu is on the show

But that one of the down-sides of playing RPGs is that the biggest resource they take up is time, and how that's one of the few resources that we can't renew. And he's not wrong.

Talk of Final Fantasy brings up hacking, which brings up Red Mages - trust us, there's a link - which brings us to Maurice Leblanc and the video game Thief.

Jay brings up a great point when talking about Final Fantasy only RPGs - of which there have really only been two. He asked Morgan whether he'd seen "the TV show", referring to Final Fantasy XIV: Dad of Light, but Morgan thought he was referring to Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV - at least it wasn't Final Fantasy Unlimited; which does have a banger of an intro song.

Seriously though, Dad of Light was really good actually. If you have the chance to watch it, please do.

We then take Morgan to...

The Thunder Plain Games

For those who are new to the pod, we have a section called "Thunder Plain Games" which might be vaguely reminiscent of a certain programme on BBC Radio 4 - but for copyright reasons, it is completely different.

Imagine that you are in Final Fantasy X, and the Thunder Plains) is a place that you get banished to. And what we're going to do is we're going to open a portal to the Thunder Plains and, very nicely and politely, boot you through it. You will get help, maybe it will be tomorrow, maybe it will be in a week, maybe it will be in an hour.

To stop you from getting bored, we've said that we'll keep the portal open and we'll throw through up to three video games and everything you need to play them - including an Internet connection. The only rules are that you can't ask for help, because help is on the way, and you can't tell anyone that you're in the Thunder Plains.

Full Show Notes

Make sure to check out the full show notes for more discussion on the points we raise, some extra meta-analysis, and some links to related things.

Have you played the Outbreak series of games? Are you a fan of survival horror games? What about rogue-likes? Will you be checking out the Outbreak games after this episode? Did you have a question we didn't cover?

Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, leave a comment on the show notes or try our brand new contact page.

Links

Here are some links to some of the things we discussed in this episode:

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