#72 Has gaming finally had its craziest spinoff?

We swear this episode is about spinoffs such as Like A Dragon: Yakuza Pirate in Hawaii (real name), but we also take some detours to bully the Concord Discord, and also talk about Sean's friend's mom. Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland sure is weird, huh? I don't even remember if we talked about the Patrick Star game but it's in the thumbnail on YouTube. Maybe we talk about it. So much funny.

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SHOW NOTES
The "where to start with Yakuza" video that Brody said Chris made is actually on Kevin's channel. We have removed Brody from the channel for this grave error. Link here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjpgNJImQIM

TODAY'S CRUBCAST HOSTS
Brody: https://www.youtube.com/@RACROX
Chris: https://www.youtube.com/@MykonosFan
Kevin: https://www.youtube.com/@TheGoldenBolt
Sean: https://www.youtube.com/@Wolfkaosaun

CHAPTERS
00:00 Debuting Sean's new brand as a woke pirate (in Hawaii)
07:23 We are baffled yet completely unsurprised by this game
24:44 We attempt to tackle the main topic here
25:50 But instead talk about Kevin and Sean's friend's mom
34:27 The Concord Discord Story (not timestampbait)
49:12 Dissecting Persona Dancing and Pokemon spinoffs
55:41 We denounce Canadian fast food chains
1:04:51 A timely dissection of LittleBigPlanet 3
1:11:57 A random person's Crubscriber Question of the Week

Creators & Guests

Host

Brody

Brody is the owner of the RACROX channel on YouTube. Ask him about the Spyro remakes.

Host

Chris

Chris is the owner of the MykonosFan channel on YouTube. He hasn't been to Mykonos.

Host

Kevin

Kevin is the owner of The Golden Bolt channel on YouTube. He's a boul.

Host

Sean

Sean is the owner of the Wolfkaosaun channel on Twitch. Talk to him about Garfield.

What is Crubcast?

The Crubcast is a weekly podcast tackling various gaming and life topics with a touch of controlled chaos.

What's the craziest spinoff that any game's ever had?

Today on the Crubcast, we might talk about that.

I'm not sure.

My name's Kevin, I'm here with Chris.

Hello, Chris.

We planned this week's episode.

We did a lot of planning, especially Brody, who just laughed.

Hi, Brody.

Hi.

Lots of planning.

And our dancing man for today's episode is Sean.

Hello, Sean.

Call me Woke Kyo-san, thank you.

Woke Kyo-san is his new brand name.

Go to youtube.com/atwokekyo-san to follow him there.

So, yeah, today on the Crubcast, one of the things we wanted to talk about was Pirate Majima Yakuza game that exists.

If you if you haven't followed the news, they announced a game that is so insane that it makes complete sense for that series.

It is like a like a dragon.

Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is the spinoff.

Yeah, I was going to say that that when when that popped up, when when Chris posted about that, I was like, yeah, like you said, that does make sense for the series until I learned that it takes place within the canon of the mainline games and isn't like an Isshin back in time style thing.

It's just out there within.

So he's just in modern day in a pirate ship going around.

Why?

How does that work?

So the trailer actually spoils a small part of Yakuza 8 Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth, because it takes place afterwards and they reference that island that is traveled to in that game.

They don't really explain any part of why Majima, and they will in the game, but they just kind of said, Yeah, he woke up on an island and now he's a pirate.

That's it.

Have fun.

He has memory loss.

Yeah.

He has memory loss.

Which is not exactly how it worked for Ichiban in 8, but...

It's pretty close.

It's pretty close.

So at first, I was watching the trailer and I was like, are they just putting Majima into 8?

And the joke is that they're parodying how Ichiban winds up in Hawaii.

But A, he wasn't naked, which is unfortunate.

And B, the trailer happened.

So that's not the case.

Plus, Ichiban goes to Hawaii for an organic reason.

It's just the original trailer implied that he somehow washed ashore thousands of miles away from home.

Yeah, yeah.

It's gonna be interesting.

I said to Chris, we should have expected immediately that they were gonna do a pirate game when we had them make an Animal Crossing Dundoko Island thing.

Do you fight pirates?

We should have immediately known, and we just, it didn't occur to us.

And Chris, what are your thoughts on that?

Like, give me your thoughts, because I, yeah.

I...

stunned into neutrality, I think, is what I said to you.

Because again, it's like, what on earth is this?

But also, yeah, of course, right?

Yeah.

Like, even by Yakuza standards, it is pretty crazy.

And I think the game director or someone came out and said, like, yeah, this trailer is a lot goofier, but there will have a lot of serious stuff in the game, too.

So I think it is going to take itself seriously.

But if you just look at what they've shown, it is a little like what on earth led you to this point in your lives to do this kind of vibe.

I, um, it's weird with Yakuza because, like, I just kind of accepted that, you know, it's on-site with these games, right?

Like, I'll play them.

There's no question.

I've never heard it on-site used as a positive before.

Yeah, I mean, it's on-site.

It's like, I'm not going to not play one, you know what I mean?

So it is a little bit like, okay, well, mentally, I'll think about that later, which is a weird place to be.

But I like how frequently they come out.

But I have to say, as a huge shill of the series, wouldn't mind the pace slowing down some.

I think that's maybe where I'm at.

Because it's just straight up like, I can't even really think about replaying these games for nostalgic purposes or anything anymore, because it's like, I kind of need to break to be ready for the next one.

I feel like there isn't a lot of time to appreciate what has been.

It's always kind of like, okay, finished the last game, breather.

I'll look at a new one.

I had said to you that I had a craving recently to play Zero, and I should have known that meant another game was coming.

So for those that maybe don't know my Yakuza history, that haven't heard me talk about it, I have played at this point, I'm caught up.

I started in 2017 with Kiwami 1 because Chris was telling me about it.

And at this point, we had already made it clear that we have very similar opinions on games.

So if he likes Yakuza, I'll probably like Yakuza.

And so I played a bit of Kiwami back then in 2017 on stream on YouTube at that point, put it down for three months because streaming a game where you have to read everything while talking to two people on chat or in the voice call.

Not a good idea.

I then came back to it, beat that and beat to Kiwami to back to back.

So put like 100 hours into them and I understood immediately.

And ever since then, just about once a year, I find time to go and play one game and then play the new one.

So I played three and judgment together.

I played four and lost judgment together or maybe four and seven.

I played four and something else together.

And I've eventually, by the time we were getting close to Infinite Wealth, Yakuza 8, I said, OK, I'm going to finish five that I had started and got stopped at the point that everyone stops when you're in prison forever.

And played five, played six, played Gaiden, was caught up.

So I again, when I when I had the feeling that, OK, I'd be cool to play zero and finally be caught up before they release something at the end of 2025.

I should have known that meant that as soon as February hits, there was going to be a spinoff.

I should have known because they had Isshin 8 came out in February like it's consistent.

And I.

It's an interesting issue to run into because these games are so dense with content, but I'm also pretty confident that this game will be relatively short.

So it'll only be a, you know, 20 hour platinum maybe.

I'm not thinking it's going to be that long.

If that based on what?

I think this might be a meatier one than you're expecting.

I mean, it could be there probably is more side content, but I'm thinking based on Gaiden because this is called Gaiden in Japan.

They have said they gave a weird number.

It was like one point five times longer, one point four.

That's weird.

Some other game maybe was the first Gaiden.

I don't know.

They basically implied it's not full, but it's not Gaiden like somewhere.

Because Gaiden, if you do do the side content as you come through it, it's like an eight, ten hour game.

I think it was a 12 hour platinum.

And that was as I did everything as I went.

You could ostensibly probably beat that game in like five, six hours, you know, probably.

But if you're playing a Yakuza game at a certain point, you know how to absorb content in the way that is ideal for you, because these games have so much content to them that for me, I got through it relatively quick and I'm expecting this to be the same.

But also, like you said, stunned into neutrality is probably a good way to phrase it, because I'm.

I'm not surprised.

I am surprised.

And I guess I'm most surprised by like.

The fact that.

It's a Majima game, because it seemed like his story was already now wrapped up to by a proxy of Curious Story having been wrapped up and the Yakuza story having been wrapped up for multiple games now in that one's case.

So right.

Yeah, like they've jumped the shark so many times that I am questioning whether they physically can jump the shark, especially when there was a shark in the last game.

Yeah, I don't want to spoil what happens with that shark, but they jumped the shark so hard that they may have invented a new way of saying it, jumped the shark by involvement of who it eats.

That, but also they're just, yeah, we trained this shark to circle this island and eat anything that comes close to it, is an actual thing, they say.

Yo.

As a direct sequel to the game that has a character named Mirrorface who can perfectly mimic the exact face of anybody, period.

Stupid.

It's a weird thing.

That's just Metal Gear.

That sounds like it's gone the Fast and Furious route, where they're just like, yeah, here's the grounded Fast and Furious movies, like grounded in quotations, but where it's like Cars and stuff.

And then they just do Hobbs and Shaw where it's a superhero movie.

And it's hard to say, because like Yakuza has never been a serious franchise.

I don't mean that as an insult.

I mean, the first couple of games have the, a very famous landmark in Japan open up to show a giant fortress.

Like, it splits in half and inside.

I am under the impression that Yakuza is just like soap opera.

The game.

Yeah, it's just WWE meets soap opera.

Well, and it got even crazier as time went on, because as of like, more so like six onward, I would say, but really I would like it's six.

It's judgment, it's seven.

Lost judgment and eight onward.

There are now government conspiracies involved in all of these games, because it was the crime underbelly, you know, story of twists and turns and fun chaos and emotional moments.

And then at a point, it started becoming also because the Yakuza are so entwined with the government, the government is also involved in all of this as well, which is why they're trying to get rid of the Yakuza as a macro story.

So you have stories about a World War II-era ship that has been kept a secret for years, because if the secret came out that it existed, it would essentially cause World War III, because they did it against the U.S.'s occupation of Japan and the requirements.

That's an actual plot of a game.

It's a great game.

It's wild, and they're always good, to be clear.

Mirrorface is the exception, but they're always good.

That's the thing, you question why they're doing a Majima game, but I think as someone that tried to get into the series, played Kiwami probably to like 75 to 90% of the way through, and I just haven't gone back and finished it, I kind of came off of that like, yeah, I get it.

This is very endearing.

It's very charming.

I'm probably not going to be one of those people that plays all of the side content just because some of these mini games are a little bit not great.

That is good.

Yeah.

Like, I don't know, maybe that's like a remake of Kiwami thing, like maybe they get better in the later ones, or not remake of Kiwami, but you know what I'm saying.

They do get a little better as time goes on.

Yeah, it's just they felt a little jank, and I was like, I can take or leave them, like I'm probably not going to do them.

And I just kind of rushed the story so that I could actually like enjoy the game, because I knew that if I was trying to do all the minigames and stuff, I just would never finish it.

And granted, I haven't, so hey.

But there was there were several points where I thought, oh, maybe this is my time to get back into it.

Like, obviously, Chris has the whole video about whether or not you should start with seven and because that's, you know, a new character and stuff.

But it still does continue the story by what you guys have said.

And so this is the first time where I'm thinking like, oh, maybe I could, because I like Majima as a character.

He's probably my favorite character that I've encountered in the series thus far, because he's very much like, he's very Vegeta coded, very Venom coded in terms of, in terms of the, yeah, he's like the Venom of Yakuza, right?

He's the anti-hero.

You like him, but he's kind of an asshole.

And so that's very endearing to me.

I love pirate stuff.

So the idea of having that style of character go do pirate things is very, very appealing to me specifically.

Yeah.

And if it is like a Gaiden thing where it's more or less, I mean, I don't know if this is true of Gaiden.

I guess maybe it's not because it is a continuing curious story, but it sounds like it's trying to be a more standalone-ish experience than the rest.

I say ish, obviously, because of course.

Yeah, this one is definitely, this one is straight up, we had a fun idea and we said screw it and did it.

The other one was more like, this is going to flush out plots of six and seven and kind of eight a little bit.

You kind of actually needed to know the surrounding games to get something out of the first Gaiden, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, to an extent.

So Gaiden was the quest for booty.

It gets weird, because that was supposed to be a DLC for seven, and they realized it was to widen scope and they were also trying to go back to beat them up gameplay, which we should say Pirate Yakuza is a beat them up game.

Only the Ichiban games are turn based RPGs.

And mind you, Infinite Wealth is probably one of the best RPGs I've ever played.

So they're very good.

That's another thing is why I didn't go and start with seven is because I just I'm like, well, I'm not I'm not huge on turn based.

Like you have to do a lot of stuff to get me into turn based.

And hey, maybe they do.

But it's harder for me to like, yeah, it's tougher for me to take a chance on them.

I guess what I'm saying.

Whereas Pirate Majima is like, you've sold me on concept alone.

Yeah, yeah.

It's um, seven had promising gameplay that was marred by the fact that they allegedly made it an RPG in the span of a year after seeing an April Fool's joke went well.

Allegedly.

I still don't believe that.

But it fleshes it out so much so that you can almost believe it retroactively.

You can almost believe that, oh, you know, they did have three more years to work on making it an RPG now and it works.

It's better.

But those games are a combination of the closest that you can get to like an adult Paper Mario and an adult Earthbound because they just are spoofs of the genre itself, like an Earthbound kind of is in a loving capacity.

I forget where I said it to you, Kevin, it was probably on this podcast actually, but it especially straddled the weird line of paying tribute to the genre while also being a very good entry in the genre itself.

Usually you get one or the other, but it somehow just perfectly straddled the line of like paying tribute to basically every GRPG while also earning its own spot next to all of them.

It's very interesting.

It's the discourse buzzword of the year, which is loving versus garbage heat.

Soulless.

Yeah.

And those are words, not a word.

Liar.

So now you say, yeah, this game starts with Majima washing up on an island with amnesia.

Yes.

Yes.

Is he in the dream of the wind fish?

Well, we haven't stopped to consider that.

It could be.

It could all be a dream.

And he wakes up in his weird, his weird Hokkaido little shack.

Cause they were in Hokkaido, right?

It doesn't matter.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

It's, it's interesting because the trailer, at least what the cinematic they had, like they had their own little Nintendo direct live E3 kind of thing to announce this game last week.

And the trailer framing was Majima sitting down in the chair and basically being like, so here's how I got into this mess.

So now there's some question of like, didn't this actually happen?

Or is he just bullshitting on this chair?

Right.

Yeah.

So I guess we'll see.

I hope both.

I have hopes for this because A, I mean, obviously I'm going to like it no matter what, probably.

It looks fun.

And all this, all the gameplay stuff looks cool.

You can jump and there's like air combos now, like that all looks crazy.

Very Judgment Core.

Very Judgment Core.

Which is great.

Because Judgment, Lost Judgment is the best combat in the series ever.

But I hope for this is I don't want it to kind of get too serious, I guess.

But Majime is a weird case where, especially thanks to Zero, he is a very inconsistent character.

He's very, yeah, which maybe is kind of the point.

Like in Zero, it got to the point where people were like, how did he even become the character later in the series?

Like, is it all an act?

Is he just putting on a front?

And then you get games like Yakuza 5, where you're like, I don't think they even meant for him to be in this game, because I don't understand what he's doing in this game, right?

He's kind of all over the place.

I would like this game to either definitively establish his character in such a way, where it makes sense for how you get from zero to one, because they did say you'll see certain events from the series from his perspective.

That's the classic Amnesia tale thing, right?

Amnesia is kind of, it's one of those plot devices that is memed on, but also it's an interesting way to do a character study of like, okay, what is this character's personality without all of the experiences that they've necessarily gone through?

Does it, like, will Majima retain his textbook, like, wild card, crazy guy personality, or does he revert to some sort of basic human being that doesn't have that?

Which would be boring, I'd hope they don't do that, but...

I'd like them to go there, but not, like, have them stay there, you know what I mean?

I think just kind of, like, reheat some leftovers on that and kind of go...

I don't know that they'll be able to...

Because, like, obviously this is a game that's going to be for hardcore fans of the series, but also the way that they're positioning this, this could be one of those where it's, yeah, it's fun, go play it.

And if they go super deep into Zero and the Kiwami 2 Majima campaign, which I honestly, I had always assumed, based on what you had said, that Zero did kind of establish why Majima snaps.

Kind of, but...

Yeah.

Without doing, like, spoiler stuff.

Yeah, so it's going to be interesting because, like, they can...

They're gonna hit on all of it.

They're gonna spoil things if you haven't played the other games.

They've never been afraid to do that.

I mean, case in point, the Five's plot is that Majima allegedly dies.

Guess where he is?

That made Five so hard to play after having played other games, because it's like, oh my god, they killed Majima, and I'm just like, I've played seven.

Yeah, Kiryu looking at the newspaper in his car, like, punching the steering wheel.

It's like, bro, calm down, it ain't that serious.

I think to step back, what I'm trying to say here is that Eight so effectively looked back at Kiryu's character throughout the series, and then picked a new direction for that character to go.

That's true.

I think they really paid off a lot of character work they neglected for 20 years.

I want to see that for Majima.

I think that's basically what I'm trying to get at here.

That's a very good point in that.

Like you said, Kiryu has always been such a static character and that they finally use Eight as a way to have him realize that.

And it retroactively makes Six and all of his choices better.

But I know people were very unhappy with Six because they didn't see Kiryu as a character to make the decision that he makes.

Which is stupid because it's exactly the decision he would make.

It's the most in-character thing he's ever done.

The whole plot of Six is, Kiryu, you're stupid.

Why are you always stubborn and doing it on your terms?

And then the game is like, I'm going to do it on my terms again.

And you just house.

Like your house, essentially.

But to have the way they did it in Eight, I know some people weren't happy with it being like all side content in the second half of the game.

But I thought it was masterfully done because it makes you want to root for him to actually go and it's not a spoiler because in the trailer that he goes, I have cancer.

He has cancer.

And he's saying, I don't want to seek help.

This is my punishment.

And the whole game, you're yelling at him to be like, dude, you can live.

You could try.

You know, you might not live, but you could try.

And for the second half of the game to have those things that make him start maybe realizing that as well.

Was really, really cool and a great way to cap off his character till they bring him back at nine and.

It also works so well, because not to spoil what happens, but you can get to the end of that game without doing any of that, and it hits.

But if you go through and do all of that stuff, then the ending is like 30 times better.

Yeah, yeah, it hits so much harder.

I like that you know so the fact that I said he's going to be a nine for sure.

You didn't even think it's a fact of life, you know?

Yeah.

Which nine might be Kira, you, Ijibani, Majima in a three party system, for all we know.

God, while you guys have been discussing this, I have thought because you because I'm starting to put some pieces together.

Yes.

Like Majima wakes up, he has amnesia.

Will his character be sort of this reset or will he still be insane?

But then you've also said he's going to be, we're going to be experiencing events of the series through his eyes.

Sounds to me like it'll be playable flashbacks.

Which is what Gaiden did do.

Gaiden did do that.

Yeah.

It sounds to me like if they go the route of sort of erasing his personality at the beginning, it sounds like you might be able to see him regain more and more of it every time you play one of those flashbacks.

Could be.

Oh, God, it's an Anadon game.

Oh, yeah, that was a game.

It's I obviously I'm very excited for it.

I'm excited for the fact that they just make no.

There's no reason.

They're just like, yeah, we made Hawaii.

So now Majin was here.

Like, that's that's great.

Yeah, that makes sense.

That's where I'm at.

Like, I don't want to sound like I'm not really excited for this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think you just have to put a lot more work and dazzling in, I think, to get me excited.

Like, I watched the that first trailer for eight, that was like eight or nine minutes long that may be spoiled too much.

But, you know, like halfway through the, like, cure you as cancer.

And I was just constantly going, why?

Like freaking out over that trailer.

Yeah, I can still get really excited for these games.

But, you know, for the most part, it's just like you look at your watch and again, it's about time for another one.

And then it happens and you're like, yeah, I thought so.

Like, because they're juggling so much because like there's there's potentially another judgment game any day now.

That's probably going to be their end of 2025 game, if anything, because it's been four years.

So it's about time.

The question is just whether the actor for Yagami is going to be in it or they're going to do a Kaito game.

Or if that's the reason why there's a Majima game because they haven't gotten the red tape crossed.

They haven't cut the red tape to get Yagami back.

It's either way, it got us thinking to the point of this video, of this podcast, which by the way, is available in video form at youtube.com/atcrelofficial.

You can go to crub.org for any of the audio versions.

Wherever you are, go to the other one and leave us a nice review or a thumbs up or a comment.

It can be a mean comment.

It can be a mean review.

Just leave us the five stars because it does help us grow.

Our goal is to take over Norway by the end of this year.

We're well on the way to doing that.

We're a little ahead of the schedule, actually.

Yeah, like honestly, we already have.

We get past 11.

We're at 11 for a while, aren't we?

Yeah, we're at nine now.

Oh, no, we're invading Norway.

I think we have 11.

Like I'm not talking about our podcast, right?

We're going to take over Norway.

It's going to happen.

I don't think their president or prime minister or whatever could take all of us.

Yeah, if all eight of us run it, then at once.

I mean, it's yeah, it's like, you know, can we like challenge them to ritual combat?

We could challenge them to join our Patreon at patreon.com/ Now there's an offer they can't refuse.

There are multiple tiers for you to join at.

There's the video tier where you can get all of our bonus video content, which is already hundreds of hours of extra content in the form of extra video podcasts, Mario parties.

We're doing every Mario party board, fun little let's play, things like that as well.

You can join the audio tier, which adds a bunch of our audio podcasts, on top of the video tier, which includes podcast Iman, the podcast where myself, Chris, and famous Twitch streamer JTart9 are going through every single episode of Pokemon, which is a lot of fun, and a bunch more audio stuff as well.

Or if you just want to give us a little bit of support, you can join the $2 throw a quarter at Brody tier, which is also known as the get a fun little name tag in the discord, and you can ask us questions for our Crubscriber question of the week, which we're going to do at the end of this episode.

And I'm realizing we didn't search one.

We forgot to get one for this episode.

So while you do that, Chris, while you pull one of those up, the point of this tangent into the Majima Pirate game was to come back to the most batshit sequels and spin-offs that we can imagine, because this is out there.

Hey, I got one.

Yeah, go ahead.

What if they took Horizon and made it to LEGO?

That's a good one.

Yeah.

So we didn't come prepared for this.

I figure we're just going to stream up consciousness, our thoughts on the most batshit ones.

We're not going to answer definitively.

That's what your comments are for to your listener.

But we could have phoned it in.

We are coming in hot off a state of play.

We could have just talked about that.

But instead, that's true.

I am excited for the hit new spin-off of Bloodborne, Hell Is Us.

I thought that was the new entry in the Us series, a sequel to Last of Us and Last of Us 2.

Oh, no.

I thought you were going to say us, like the movie Us.

Or This Is Us, the NBC show.

It's a weird franchise.

The Us franchise is very strange.

It's really weird because there's a whole country named after us.

There's an...

I'm not laughing at that.

Laugh.

I refuse.

Laugh.

Anyway.

It's funny.

Sean, don't make me hit on your friend's mom again.

She's not going to watch your videos anymore, dude.

That's fine, because we're going to watch them together.

It's pillow talk.

Wait, this is friend's mom?

Yeah.

Were you not here for that?

No, I thought it was no straight up, Sean.

I thought it was your mom, not your friend's mom.

No, no, I wouldn't hit on Sean's mom.

That's weird.

The entire time you were showing me those screenshots, I thought you were talking about Sean's mom.

For those that did the exclusive pre-shows we do over at twitch.tv/crubunderscoreofficialeverytuesday when we stream these live recording sessions, Sean had messaged me and said, my friend's mom likes your videos, to which and there's a long string of comments here all by me.

Yeah.

It started with why, then what's her at, then nevermind found it, followed by me saying that she freaky and I'm introducing her to nico's parents, not mine.

And implying that I drove five hours from my house to where Sean lives to meet this lady.

And I want you to know, he has responded probably 10 times within two days.

I've not sent one single message back.

Every time I saw him message in any other discord server, I sent another message and I also set alarms to send them at certain times.

Yeah, I have like one at like 3:41 a.m.

Then like the next one's at 4:42 p.m.

Like I specifically set an alarm to make sure that the amount of time the five hours would have been from me driving was the exact time.

Wait, are you serious?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Hold on.

I have to look at that now.

It's like it's like five and a half hours, which is four and a half hours.

Plus some time for sex.

The Google map.

The saddest retelling of this, but this is the whole.

Yeah, I was going to say, if you want to hear a better telling of this story, go to the go to the pre show.

Yeah, Sean's learned something new from this spinoff of The Conversation.

And this is probably the most batshit spinoff we've had here on the podcast, besides the fish bracket.

Oh, the fish bracket.

Yeah.

The arts were broken.

I don't think people understood how well we did with that.

I thought of a few spinoffs during the show because we did not play in this episode.

I think they're all really obvious, though, so I'm not sure how much of a good gamer I'm going to be.

But I just want us all to remember that the Tingle games on DS exist.

Yep.

Yeah.

Tingle's Dating Sin games.

Yep.

They're real.

Tingle Balloon Fight also.

It was a Club Nintendo reward only in Japan.

I own it.

It's over there.

That's the one I meant to get.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just Balloon Fight, but I own it.

Spyro Shadow Legacy with Moneybags' wife and kids.

Is that Spyro Shadow Legacy?

As I say, isn't that Kevin's DMs we were just talking about?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have a question about, speaking of Balloon Fight, not to give it air, but in the news this week or the last few weeks, a lot of discussion about PlayStation's IP, with the state of play, and Ashtabot going around.

And I just keep thinking of like Nintendo's version of that.

And like, are there angry Balloon Fight fans that go on Twitter and it's like, can you believe Nintendo's still neglecting Balloon Fight?

The last release was Tingle's Balloon Fight for the Club Nintendo service.

You don't get that, but you do.

You get those with F-Zero for a while until, like, the recent-

There it is.

Yeah.

I forgot about F-Zero fans.

F-Zero, most recent game made by RGG Studios.

Before the Switch, you got it with Metroid, right?

Like Metroid fans were like, the last game was Federation Force.

They've had actual food, so they've been a little quieter recently, so I forgot about them.

This is the thing that I was saying to you a couple days ago, Chris, where we were talking about a lot of the weird discourse around Sony and how I said, if Nintendo has a generational bag fumble, I don't know where these angry people are going to go because they can't go to Nintendo as the safe space of, I'm not as angry because they're doing things fun and right.

Do they go valve?

If Nintendo complete my Microsoft comeback, like if they fumble the bag, and I'm not saying they will, but I'm speculating that if they really did go back to like a full Wii U level meltdown, I don't know where a lot of these people, they might just quit games.

They might just stop talking.

They wouldn't quit games.

They'd just stop playing them.

To be fair, I think a lot of the thing, we joke about the Wii U just kind of being a bad console.

It wasn't really, but what really killed it was the fact that the 3DS just had the install base where it was more worth it to make games for that.

Well, it was that they were alternating development, and it's just the fact of it being an HD console, and HD development takes a lot more time than SD development.

They were developing games at 480p, and then suddenly had to go to at least 720p, which sounds like not a lot, but there's a huge increase in fidelity and time that's spent going in, and you're having these teams juggle essentially every year back and forth between, all right, now is the year that our games for 3DS are all going to come out, and the Wii U is going to get nothing, and now is the year when all the Wii U games are going to come out, and the 3DS gets nothing.

Also, I just want to say real quick, we're in the era of things being taken in the worst way possible all the time.

We're not shitting on F-Zero fans or Metroid fans or anything, we're shitting on the loud ones who never shut up about how there's another one.

Not the people who are like, man, it'd be cool to get a new one.

The Silksong fans.

The Silksong people, anytime anything happens, it's like, what, no new Star Fox game?

It's Nintendo's shit.

Shut up.

I'm going to start commenting on every post Microsoft makes, I'm going to be like, why isn't this Spyro?

Where's Banjo?

Why have you let the Voodoo Vince series die in the vine?

It's the same thing for Xbox fans, right?

Voodoo Vince?

The thing is, Sean, Microsoft's version of that is Banjo fans, because you will see Banjo fans under Microsoft post doing that.

That's why I'm going to do it with Spyro, because it's just so funny.

It's so much funny.

Because it's so much funny.

That's not at Grandma.

The Red Bull is hitting too much.

Make that your review of the Crubcast on the audio platform's five stars.

What's funny is so much funny.

Make it two stars and say so much funny, because that'd be better.

Don't make it two stars, because we need this.

So, very true.

We have eight iOS reviews.

Listen, you can make it two stars, unless you're in Norway.

We need your five star in Norway.

Like, if you don't own an iPhone, it takes so much time to review an Apple podcast.

I had to download iTunes and then go into iTunes and listen to at least two episodes and then review it.

So, if you review it, you don't understand how much I appreciate you personally.

Because I know how hard it is.

I need to reveal how sad this is.

Of those eight reviews, I'm one.

I'm one.

One's probably nico, one's probably Moriarty, one's Kevin.

Yeah.

I know one's Star Calibur, and there's five internal reviews.

So maybe three people organically reviewed us.

No one reviews podcasts.

It's also hard to find where to review podcasts on Apple.

You have to dig through it, and Spotify is even harder.

Spotify, you know.

Unless they ask you in a pop-up, do you want to review this?

You're not going to find it.

So again, if you have reviewed it or if you do, we really do appreciate you.

Genuinely, this isn't a plug.

It's hard.

We know.

I'm just picturing the thumbnail for this episode.

It's just Majima and Patrick Star in the thumbnail text is just so much funny.

Yeah, I want to go wait that's all that one for the news episode.

Gosh, worst games to play.

Also, really quick, I meant to bring this up forever ago.

Why are two of our tags funeral and then Kingdom Hearts community?

I was wondering.

Yeah, it finally happened.

So I've been like staring at this entire time and I'm like, I just want to talk about those and I don't.

Why?

So for those that don't know, on Twitch, when we record these again live on Twitch last week or a couple weeks ago, when we did the video games to play at a funeral episode, I added two tags, one funeral and then one Kingdom Hearts community to the Twitch tags that help people find these podcasts.

And I did Kingdom Hearts community specifically wondering how many weeks it would take for Sean to notice.

And to be fair, two.

It was only two and a half.

It wasn't on the prior episodes, so it's essentially zero.

But he didn't watch the podcast last week, so I'm counting it.

I wasn't here.

Yeah, you didn't watch.

If you had caught it, if you had watched it, you would have...

You're September Sammy, Sean.

September Sammy?

Oh, these fricking September Sammy's, man.

Now you need to explain September Sammy, because no one's going to get that.

OK, in the official concord discord.

That's enough.

But honestly, I might say enough.

There is a stigma against September joiners.

For people who joined in the latter...

Oh, that's right...

.

10 days of the 13 days of the game's existence.

Because when you join after September, you can't be an authentic fan.

Yeah, because if you're in there and you joined, you ostensibly joined after the announcement that it was going down.

So they think you're in there to like joke on it and meme on it.

Which to be fair, I am.

But we need to clarify, hey, don't go in there.

These people have already had it rough enough.

Yeah, don't don't don't harass the concord discord.

Yes, don't.

I'm in there to like take screenshots and be like, you know, among private friends, be like, this is kind of funny.

If you go in there and actually, yeah, if you actually go in there and bother them, that's not cool.

Like my favorite story of the concord discord is the fact that we kept saying the word red guy in the chat.

That's the level of bullying that I'm doing in there, is I'm just going in every once in a while to the hashtag Starchild channel, because they have a channel for every single character.

And just after someone does a bit of conversation, I just go, red guy.

And they kick you out, Kevin?

No, I join and leave every time.

So my, okay.

I don't want to be in the concord discord server to be like.

No, but if you join and leave every time, they're never going to trust you, because they're always going to see your join date is later and later.

Me?

I'm biding my time.

I'm almost in October.

Ali, thank you very much.

I went in there one night and they were talking.

And there's this one person in particular that's very, the one that called us all September Sammies.

He's very suspicious about people.

So I spent all night talking about other defunct online games like Mag, Brink, Rock It Arena.

No, no, no.

I just went on there one night.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I went on there one night and I just talked about all that.

Because I'm like, I need them to trust me in order for this to be the maximum amount of funny that it can be to me.

Like, because it's revolver ocelotting the concord discord.

It's a double thing.

Because if you go in and they're talking about something and then you could type one little message and nudge the conversation.

You don't do what the trolls do.

The trolls do come in there and they say like, oh, dead game.

This game sucks.

Overwatch is better.

You just go in there and you say something to nudge the conversation and it will just it will divulge and you don't have to do anything other than that.

And as long as they don't think you're suspicious, they'll do that.

So it's fantastic.

What's the point of you sitting here though?

Don't go bully these people.

Point two, here's an elaborate dissection of how I bully these people.

And it's OK.

He's camouflaging himself.

Yeah, OK.

It's like it's like a national sheet skin and be like, well, this is how I would go eat every sheep in that ranch.

Well, it is a it's a I'm taking the role of the National Geographic Documentarian of like, they don't dress up as hiatus.

I mean, I'm a great shooting myself into the community.

And then the annals of history here documenting the downfall.

Listen, the discord has lasted longer than the game.

It's interesting to see how the community evolves after the game died in two weeks.

My favorite bit about the concord discord was the part where where Niko went in because he saw a long conversation and he wanted to say, and he did send the phrase, I'm just a big fan of Red Guy.

Not remembering that as he sent that, he sees his profile image in the server and his name.

The profile is of the Red Guy and his name is RedGuyFan.

So you just have RedGuyFan saying after a long conversation between September Sammies, I'm just a big fan of Red Guy.

A character that I must remind you because you've already forgotten, dear listener, is mostly blue.

But he has a close up of his face so you don't see any of the blue, you just see his big red face.

This game is giving us so much.

Honestly, but out of the last 12 messages, Red Guy has been said nine times.

Red Guy, Red Guy, Red Guy, Red Guy.

Do you expect it to be a half-dip discord still?

Which is not just us.

Yeah, someone else said Rest In Peace, Red Guy.

And then September Sammies and then Kevin said, Why did you respond to it?

The watchdog, the concord discord watchdog that gets suspicious of people.

When I told him, when I told him, when he said, you know, name a character or whatever, and I'm like, oh, Red Guy.

And he's like, who's Red Guy?

And I posted the sticker of Red Guy being like, huh?

And he's like, you don't even know the character.

I'm like, no, no, no, that's Red Guy.

And he's like, say his name.

He's Starchild.

He's a proud whatever the race of this is.

He's away from someone leaking military documents.

And I'm like, no, I can't.

But then I was like, I like Itzy.

So I said a name.

My favorite is also that when he said September Sammies, I saw because one of you posted that picture of September Sammies.

So I rejoined the server to then post another picture of Red Guy.

Or I said Red Guy, parentheses July Beta edition, because we called him Red Guy here on Crubs Twitch during the stream where it was like, I'm going to pick Red Guy.

I'm just stuck.

Why does it always come back to concord?

It's all we have.

It's our new Halo Infinite.

I can't believe that people were legitimately theorizing today that it's going to be the free to play announcement on the state of play today, guys.

They would announce it that fast.

Even if they're going to do it, they would announce it like, oh, we shut the game down two weeks ago after 10 days.

It's back.

It's back for free.

It's just on stream.

It's the game that's been on the tip of your tongues for 13 days.

concord VR.

All of you September Sammies, look forward to concord Live.

That's how we find out.

That's his burner.

Oh my god.

Or is it concord Reborn?

They figure out he's in the concord server by analyzing his text and the way he speaks.

We're going freak on her to play.

Gosh.

You know what?

We're already off the rails.

I'm just going to say it.

I was in a depressive gaming slump for a year, but I had so much fun with concord that I enjoy video games again.

That's mostly true.

Did you ever think you'd be like a few weeks and I was like, there's no way I could ever say this because I would just immediately take my credibility as a human being.

Oh, no, he doesn't enjoy games.

That's the thing.

That's the thing.

I just like I've been in a depressive state for the whole year.

And it's concord that brought you out of it.

I don't know if I'm the concord.

It brought me back.

I was like, games are fun.

Yeah, I'm like dying.

I'm choking after I was having fun the whole time.

That's why I said to Chris, because Chris was trying to prove his his allegiance as well.

And he tried to be like, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He tried to prove his authenticity because he's like, oh, I have can I post my PSN profiles link of of my 50 out of 52 trophies?

And and then the watchdog was like, I don't know, man, that's I don't know.

But then Chris posted like a Lennox sticker and he was like, OK, you're cool.

You know, no one does that.

And I said to Chris, I'm like, you should just say, oh, I have a podcast.

I even did a whole podcast about concord.

And then they'll be like, but no, they'll discover you.

But like, I mean, you can't tell it's me in there.

Chris, you can tell.

But Chris has positive opinions on the game.

So they'll like him.

Yeah, he's definitely watched that podcast.

He sought that shit out.

Oh, 100 percent.

I mean, it's one of like three podcasts that probably talked about concord.

And we're the only one who hasn't said like anything.

One of three podcasts that have talked about concord.

The only one hasn't called it Woken The Thumbnail.

concord has made more money for YouTubers than Sony.

Yeah, that's a fact.

That's a fact.

Like not even counting the fact that they also refunded everybody.

Yeah, I have a question, actually, Chris.

Let's say they do bring concord back out.

And for whatever reason, it's still not free to play.

Are you paying?

No, no, no.

Here's the war.

That's obviously so funny on its own.

I want to ask specifically because are you so in in the trophy minds that you're going to pay like the 20 bucks to get that platinum?

Oh, hell yeah.

You think so?

They lower the levels.

Oh, like, OK, so clearly the problem was that it was 40 dollars.

Let's make it 20.

concord Complete Edition.

You could go to McDonald's and get the Grimace Shake or you could get concord, which one gives you more sustenance?

Dude, the craziest thing about concord is the last new variant character they added was a green version of Red Guy that just kind of looked like Shrek.

There was like Sprite.

He was like lemon, lime.

He was, I can't say Sprite because it's concord.

He was like Starry.

Oh, Starry.

Ten of my dollars are going toward the platinum, but ten of my dollars are to play as green red guy, because I didn't get to unlock him.

I'm kind of like Star Child Green.

Let's see if that even shows up.

I don't know if there's any documentation.

I don't know if there's Green Man Incense.

I don't know if you're going to be able to search the phrase Trucker Hat, Star Child, and find anything about concord, because we took this.

Like A, it's a bad name.

Star Child Trucker Hat?

As soon as I saw Chris's body language change as Sean said it.

Oh my god.

Are you lying?

The green hat that says Star Child?

Oh, wait, no, I put it in.

Oh, no, I put in the concord server instead of us.

I mean, you can still as far as I know, you can still buy concord merch at the PlayStation merch store.

You can buy a $30 beanie.

I just I literally just got worn.

Not anymore.

Now it's more than the price of the game.

concord bought just yelled at me.

I'm not.

Oh, god.

Yeah.

Oh my god.

That's making me realize.

I can't send links.

People who bought that game got concord refunded and then used their refund money to go and buy the beanie.

That's powerful.

Like a little people dude spin off.

Yeah, Chris, I really hope you still, even though we haven't talked about it at all, I hope you still put Patrick Star in the thumbnail.

Okay.

What?

This for you.

So my favorite part about-

I think this would have been this week's episode, right Brody?

Because last week was Zelda.

I had joked that this week's episode, it comes out the day that the Patrick Star game comes out.

So I said, like last week's episode was which Zelda character would win an election, I said which Spongebob character would win an election, because we're doing brand tie-ins right now for popular releases here on the Crubcast so that we can-

We just want to be-

Man, this just gets sadder and sadder, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Our brand integration for this week is Hit Game concord.

We don't prepare, and when we do prepare, it's cynical.

Well, I don't prepare ever, I'm just kinda here all the time.

Yeah.

Like, freaking, we did the fish bracket, and I was terrified by everything I saw on there.

Thank you for that.

My life has been fish for a month.

That is true.

I just love that, like, they immediately deleted my comment in concord, and you're like, no.

You can't share images.

It's kind of like in Hit Game concord, you have to hit level 6 to enter the rivalry ranked mode.

I'm almost there.

I'm level 5.

That's when you can post links.

That's when you're a real free gunner.

The best part is, Chris and I hit level 3 at the exact same time.

What do you mean level 3?

Okay, it's got like that Me6 thing or whatever, where it tells you, as you post so many messages, it gives you like a level in the discord.

It's an old discord thing that for whatever reason they put in the concord one, but you also have to be level 6 in order to post images and stuff.

So I guess there's like a function to it.

But Chris and I were in there at one point and literally I got the notification in the channel, because I haven't muted.

I'm like, where's my, where's this notification?

Why do I have one?

And I see that it's in that channel and I look and right above it, in the exact same timestamp is Mykonos fan free gunner hit level three at the same time I did.

I don't know where to write.

So as far as as far as crazy spinoffs go, like I do think that Pirate Majima is probably up there, because yes, it's fully believable.

But I think it, like I think genuinely, even the fact that it's believable for Yakuza still underscores how insane that series is.

Oh, I didn't even say anything.

Yeah.

Sorry.

No, no, more than it just more than it is like, oh, well, that doesn't count because it's normal for the series.

No, it's still insane.

They still made a pirate boating side content game in a series that didn't have boats before.

It's not Assassin's Creed 4 where they had boats and they were like, what if we made a whole game out of boats?

No, they they just chose to make a boating mechanic because they wanted to make fun of the hit game Skull and Bones.

Gosh, that's all it could be.

This will be a better game than that and see if these combined.

I will say, did they show up?

I didn't actually watch the gameplay area if there was gameplay.

Did they show off like ship combat?

Sort of.

It's said through texts that you can explore.

Whether you're actually sailing or it's a map, who knows?

But they implied it was like sailing.

And you do fight on the boats because you're going to be fighting other ships as well.

Like, I don't know that you're going to have like Sly 3 ship combat.

I was going to say, like, I really like the Sly 3 combat that Assassin's Creed 4 stole.

And Skull and Bones.

Rightfully.

Well, Skull and Bones overcomplicates it to the point where I'm just like, why?

You guys had it right in AC4.

Like, you just you stole from Sly.

Like Assassin's Creed as a series always does.

And it worked.

Just give us that.

Are you excited for the AC4 remake, though?

Are they doing that?

It's kind of.

Yeah, actually, I think so.

I think that is a thing that's happening immediately.

Like, you know what?

I like the ship combat in that game.

I think it's really good.

You should.

I'll say Metal Gear Survive is up there.

Yeah, that thing should not exist.

Here's one that I have to one Megaman soccer because I found that very weird as a kid.

But the other one for two reasons.

Is Persona 3 and 5 dancing?

Because it's a dancing game, but also it's only three and five.

There's no four.

No, no, no.

Four.

No, no, no, Sean.

Here's some fun, some fun info.

Three and five only exists because four was getting remastered.

So you can't get three or five without getting the four special edition physically.

You can get them digitally now.

But at first, you needed four's special edition.

Because four, Dancing All Night, was a Vita game.

Was it the other way around?

No, there's definitely three of them, at least.

I think you had to get the three and five special edition, and then that came with four?

I don't think four is like, oh, it did come out in 2018.

I lied.

I'm stupid.

Yeah, four's been a thing for a while.

Like four was a thing.

I didn't know they-

I didn't know they-

Because it was Persona 4, Dancing All Night, then there's Persona 3 and 5, Dancing in Moonlight and Starlight or Flipped.

Yeah, one of the two.

Yeah, it's Moonlight and then Starlight.

Yeah.

Yeah, I thought-

Because four's where they went insane with that.

Hence the fighting game with nonico and the other fighting game with nonico.

Four had like an actual story sequel, didn't it?

That was like an actual continuation of the canon.

I think five was as well.

So I think all the five spinoffs are canon.

Five went more so with that than...

Because four's technically sequel is Arena.

Because Arena takes place after the end of four.

I think the other Arena that is then a sequel to it takes place somehow before that.

I'm not sure.

Yeah.

But I was told not to play and do not play Persona 4 Arena, because apparently it spoils the ending of Persona 4.

It does.

There is a character on the character select screen that just says, they're the villain.

It just reveals who did it.

And then Persona 5, like all the other spin-offs, are like, yeah.

Anyway, you're in like summer.

Have fun.

Bye.

Yeah.

Persona dancing is pretty crazy, because like, you know, okay, sure, the characters would dance, but to then go and make three entire games about that concept is quite something.

You know, it's one game that I always want to try, that I've heard a lot of good things about, is Pokemon Conquest.

I will literally piss in your shoe.

We were just talking about Pokemon Conquest today, Chris, actually.

I was looking it up in Messaging Kevin about it at 5 a.m.

Is that the League of Legends, not the MOBA?

No, that's...

No.

Nobunaga's Ambition?

Yeah.

So, Conquest is essentially a Dynasty Warriors game with Pokemon, sort of.

Okay.

But it's also a Tactics as well, yeah.

So like Persona Strikers, which I definitely thought was a soccer game.

No, Strikers is the Dynasty Warriors game, yeah.

Yeah, Strikers.

Strikers is actually kind of fun, I won't lie.

Nobunaga's Ambition isn't like exactly Dynasty Warriors, it's just, I think it's the same team.

Isn't it like turn-based?

It's like in Tactics, it's weird.

It's a weird series.

Yeah.

It's a grand strategy game genre.

Okay.

So, they should make Civilization X Pokemon.

You know what?

They should.

You could, like playing as all the different regions, that would be kind of cool.

I want to give Gandhi the ability to destroy the world.

Well, in Sinnoh, they sleep with the Pokemon.

Yeah, then Gandhi should still be in it.

So, in Sinnoh, you'd be able to have Pokemon-Human hybrids that are just banging all the time, and that would give the Sinnoh region leaders the advantage over other regions, I think.

Gosh.

I bonded with my Pokemon more than Hoenn.

I like how it has a fire and limb bonding mechanic as well.

Yeah, like a Hoenn having a water-

like, the way that Polynesia doesn't serve.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm down with that.

We're geniuses.

Yeah, we should just make games.

The Pokemon crossover spin-offs go kinda hard though, right?

Because there is Pokken and this, and that's probably it.

But they should keep making more.

Pokemon Snap, Pokemon Dash, Pokemon Troze, and also Pokemon Puzzle-

not Puzzle Eve, there's the other one that's not Troze.

Pokemon Sleep!

Mystery Dungeon.

Actually, wait, that's not a collab, I think.

No, Mystery Dungeon's kind of a collab.

Mystery Dungeon rocks.

Mystery Dungeon's awesome.

Yeah.

Mystery Dungeon.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah, I always forget that Mystery Dungeon is its own series, and it wasn't just a thing Pokemon had.

Yeah, that's from Spike Chunsoft, actually.

Yep.

Does is Rangers the same or is Rangers actually an original concept?

Rangers is an original IP.

Interesting.

I think Chris, you poked my brain earlier when you said Metal Gear Solid survive, because, oh, well, yeah, because genuinely you did.

You poke him on my brain.

No, you brought up Metal Gear Solid and genuinely like it's it's weird to think back because now it seems like such a staple in the series that you're like, yeah, of course, that just exists in the Metal Gear Solid canon timeline.

But like Revengeance when it was announced as a full on like platinum action game Raiden taking place after for like showing you what happened to like Sonny and Raiden and everything after that.

And like the fact that that game is was written by Kojima's protege and acts as basically a it is a loving parody of the entire series.

And it's so good in that regard.

Like it fits so well.

Well, it's so ridiculous, but also takes itself so seriously that it just works because it's like, of course, why why wouldn't this happen?

You know, why wouldn't you just pull his heart out?

The meme, like the meme nanomachines son is genuinely one of honestly like, OK, there's there's twists within Metal Gear that are better than that.

But like the reveal of OK, this whole game is you fighting cyborgs.

So they're actually doing something with the cyborg element of Metal Gear, and they're fleshing that out and doing a lot with it to then have the final boss be like, it's nanomachines again, motherfuckers.

I almost swear jarred.

But like, it's like, that's awesome.

Like three times.

It's so cool.

I also love that, like the thing that gets memed about the most in that game is like, OK, the final boss, blah, blah, blah.

The final boss only exists for like maybe 11 minutes, that entire runtime.

But you never see them ever.

Yeah, but it's so it's so awesome.

It's like it's the I play I played the Metal Gear Rising final boss theme when I fight other final bosses in other video games, especially if it's like one that I'm replaying a lot, like if it's a Souls boss that I can't beat.

I'm like, OK, this is the run and I play.

It has to be this way.

I thought you about to say like I play that song every time I let you just go fight people in the middle of Denny's parking lot.

I listened to it during a workout just the other week, the whole soundtrack.

Do you have Denny's, Brody?

Yeah, we have Denny's.

Why?

I think.

Yeah, wait, why?

Why does Canada?

That feels weird.

Canada should not.

Yeah, there's like I like there's there's some is that like in tourist Denny's Canada spinoff is I don't know that I like I don't know.

Is there better A&W up in there, which is weird.

We do have a lot more.

And apparently, apparently.

What about Long John's?

We don't have that.

That's disgusting.

I don't think you'd want any fish in mainland Canada ever.

I don't think you'd want to eat fish there.

We don't have Sonic.

We don't have.

That's fair.

What's the Jack something?

Jack in the Box?

Yeah, we don't have Jack in the Box.

You could.

We have Harvey's.

What is Harvey's?

Harvey's?

What's the V?

Harvey's, yeah.

H-A-R-V-E-Y-S.

What is that?

It's a burger place.

It's really good.

I swear to God, if Carl's Jr.

and Hardy's also has a third name, I'm gonna kill myself.

No, no, no.

Harvey's is Harvey's is its own Canadian thing.

It's sort of like the subway of burgers.

Like you go up and you order the burger and they have all of they have all of the ingredients like in that.

It's it's heated.

It's fine.

No, no, no.

Like you said, like Chipotle or something.

When you say the subway of burgers, I'm like, oh, so it's terrible.

OK, no, but I just mean like they have the ingredients behind the glass and then they bring up the patty and they're like, OK, what do you want on it?

And you tell them what you want on it from behind the glass.

I don't get burgers from there anyway.

I get I get the buffalo chicken sandwich because it's delicious and it's slathered in buffalo sauce.

You guys shouldn't have buffalo sauce.

That's our thing.

We have we have the city of buffalo and also buffaloes.

You don't just because it's kind of close to your country.

We don't have buffalo anymore, but.

I just see who owned Harvey's and it's not it's not Hardee's and I hate it.

Was it Jonathan Harvey?

I think Harvey's is owned.

It's a Canadian company because they also own Swish LA and Montana's and milestones.

Why do you have Montana's too?

This is such bullshit.

Yeah, Montana is not in fucking Canada.

Sorry.

Well, because there's these gift cards that if you're Canadian, you've gotten one of these gift cards and it's like it's a it's a it's a fast food gift card or like a restaurant gift card, but it works at Harvey's, Swish LA, Montana's milestones and like a few other places, presumably because they're all under the same company.

Oh, and not only that, so there's there's a line of movie theaters called like Cineplex or Silver City, and they have a deal with these guys.

So they have a thing called a scene card, which is essentially their points card.

And you can use, you can earn points by going to like Swish LA or Harvey's or Montana's.

You can earn points to then get free movies by eating.

So they build whenever they build a new movie theater, they build it in this strip mall plaza, and they always put like a Montana's and a Swish LA and a Harvey's in there so that you can like go have dinner and a movie and use your scene points cards.

Your vertical monopolies there are a lot worse than getting the PepsiCo, taco Bell, Doritos, taco, and Baja Blast combo.

I'm just gonna like, with Fritos.

With the Doritos, taco.

She got weird when Burger King bought Tim Hortons, because now Tim Hortons is owned by an American company, and they have been going downhill since.

That tracks for Burger King.

Yeah, Burger King should really like Chuck E.

Can you get a Whopper at Tim Hortons though?

No, but you can get-

You can get pizza, a little Whopper at Pizza.

They just introduced a new Tim Hortons energy drink, which is apparently good, I haven't had it.

What?

What do you mean a new one?

They had any?

No, no, no, like they never they never had one.

So it's like now it's a which like it makes sense.

Because like it sounds like they had some before.

And I was like, what do you mean another one?

Well, because Starbucks has like the iced coffee energy drink.

So I guess this is their answer.

This is their answer to that.

I think Brody, do you have Panera up there?

Uh, no.

Can you go to one and drink a lot of the lemonade?

Wait, is Panera the buffet?

Like, drink a lot of lemonade.

No, no, that's CC's pizza.

You'll find out when you get there, Brody.

Well, no, because I remember one time I...

And don't look into what it is and just drink a lot of it.

Kitty.

Read the concord discord while you drink it so you can go out doing something you like.

I remember one time we were in Florida, I think, oh, Ponderosa, I think it is.

We were in Florida and nothing was open.

We had been to Disneyland and we were kind of like coming home, but we needed dinner before we kind of left or whatever.

And or maybe it was the night before and we slept and then left in the morning.

But anyway, we needed something to eat and everything was closed because it was like the winter time too, I think.

But this is it was in Florida, so it wasn't like winter winter.

But it was like holidays.

It's not open.

And we go to Ponderosa's.

And I remember eating specifically, they had a trough of ground beef, of taco meat, ground beef.

And I just took so much of it and I just ate it.

And I would have been 14 or 15 at the time.

A trough?

Did you come over like a little horsey and just eat it?

No, but that's genuinely what it was.

No, it was elevated, but the only way to describe it is as a trough.

That makes food sound disgusting for some reason.

That's a weird spinoff of food.

But yeah, I think Metal Gear Survive is up there, Revengeance is up there.

Chris, do you have another one?

Yeah, on this spinning top of an episode where it's been teetering every which way, I reached out to a neutral third party political analyst about the SpongeBob election thing.

So I have an input on that if we care to entertain it real quick.

Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah.

Okay.

So what's SpongeBob character when the election, I reached out to famous YouTuber, That Trav Guy.

I said, what's SpongeBob character when the election?

He says, when not just run Mr.

Krabs, everyone hates him.

He's selfish as shit.

He's just like Trump, so he wins by surprise.

Jesus Christ.

I feel like Plankton wins, honestly.

No, people won't vote for Plankton.

That would be the matchup, though, right?

Krabs versus Plankton.

Plankton would just move with them.

No, SpongeBob would stumble into it.

Plankton would buy Twitter.

Or Squilliam.

Because Plankton wouldn't win because people would be like, well, he's too small.

Yeah, and he would also then try to go on Twitter and try to buy Twitter.

Plankton would make a robot.

I will say, Brody, I think Squilliam would be a JD Vance-like.

Plankton would make a big robot.

Squilliam would be one of those billionaires that tried to run in the last one.

Plankton would be a big robot to pretend to be him, and it would fall apart during the debate.

And that's how he would win.

We're overlooking one very important person that I think would win, and that is Larry the Lobster.

I was thinking Larry the Lobster, too.

His steroid scandal would stop him.

Oh, no, there's no scandal.

He makes it legal.

Mrs.

Puff, I'm with her.

Yeah, he becomes governor of California, makes steroids legal there, and then becomes president.

Oh, yeah, it's like the Olympics.

It's like the the juice Olympics that they're trying to do.

Yeah, yeah, they actually they don't they don't enforce it, but they allow it.

I'm just like, it's a weird one.

I think we've normalized Luigi's Mansion.

That's kind of a weird one.

Yeah, I mean, I love it.

No, I mean, the first one like think about like launching your system and being like, all right, we're going to launch the successful sequel that has to compete with the what's going to be the biggest thing that we already know.

It's wildly successful, but Mario 128 is not done yet.

So here's a Resident Evil game where you play as Luigi and you suck ghosts like Ghostbusters.

With a vacuum cleaner.

With a vacuum cleaner.

And god damn it, it worked.

It did.

It did work.

It took a while, but it worked.

It was crazy.

It was fantastic.

And I like, like, OK, the commitment to the aesthetic in that game that they don't have in 2 and 3 is really, I think, why I love the first game, because 2 and 3 goes for that like Tim Burton, there's no straight rectangles.

Everything's on like a weird SQ slant aesthetic.

And one is just like, this is like a Resident Evil.

The door looks like a Haunted Mansion door.

It's kind of creepy.

Tim Burton's.

I think it's a now Tim.

I was going to say Project Crosszone, speaking of of weird Nintendo games.

That's not that that is Nintendo, but it kind of can be because it's a it's capcom, namco.

What's the name?

The Xenoblade guys.

Monolith, Monolith, thank you, because they're in there.

They made it.

There's some fire emblem.

There's some fire emblem in there as well.

Just a bunch of bunch of companies that are all together in a weird, really long kind of RPG thing.

What a game.

That's the one I'm always most afraid to play, because it's like, I know there's Shenmue guy, there's Segata Sanshiro, like Kiryu and Majima are in there mucking it up, right?

Like I know there's stuff I would laugh at and enjoy if I did play it, but by every indication, the game is completely mediocre and maybe boring.

And I don't know if I can do that myself.

That is one of the games where Dig Dug is a deadbeat dad as well.

Though that's mostly in Super...

Is it Super Robot Wars was the original Cross Zone game series?

I think Super Robot Wars became namco X capcom, which became Project Cross Zone.

Okay.

Because namco X capcom is the game that has Dig Dug as a deadbeat dad and divorced.

And we put it on Justin Streamwheel eight times.

Yeah, he still hasn't played it.

There's a spinoff that managed to kill two IPs with one stone.

Little Big Planet Karting, let's go.

That's not like a weird one, that's just kind of an interesting story.

It is, it is a very interesting story.

I am very sad about the story that it tells.

For those that don't know, when the Vita launched, they made a Mod Nation Racers game for Vita, and then had the team that made all the Mod Nation Racers games make LittleBigPlanet Karting for later that same year.

So they made two kart games with creative elements in the same year, and naturally that little big planet karting wasn't very good.

Yeah, it was just very confusing because Mod Nation Racers is so good, and then to have karting come out and be what it was and be just kind of bad and then...

The creation suite was even interesting because they tried to like evolve it from Mod Nation Racers, where Mod Nations was very designed to make racetracks.

Kartings was supposed to be like, okay, well, you can do racetracks, you can do battle arenas, but also you can do weird, like almost 3D, like level stuff, but not really because you still have to be in a kart the whole time.

But we have the creation suite for you to do that, almost like a proto dreams, but it didn't work.

It wasn't good in that way.

And they also tried to add all of the DLC, like any DLC you had from one, two and three, like costume DLC and the way that you had them all in all the LittleBigPlanet games, they tried to put them in that game, but it didn't quite work.

Everything kind of clipped through each other.

I'll throw out one thought about LittleBigPlanet, which is A, Sackboy is a really good spinoff, but B, I think that that's probably the mistake of having a PS3 era game where every single piece of outfit ever can cross over between one, two, three, and I think the Vita game.

I think that's part of what made three such a problem for the team that wasn't making the games that Sumo Digital took over.

It was.

The interesting thing.

No, no, no, no, okay.

Yeah, Sumo did a really good job with three, like in a way that it makes me feel bad that that game kind of flopped the way that it did, because it is like it is with no room for argument, the most advanced little big planet game and the one that gives you the most sort of creative freedom.

The creation suite is amazing in that game.

The levels are pretty good.

I don't know.

Like the story is a little less imaginative than one and two, but like it's still like the levels themselves are really good.

And the fact that they added like the idea of hub worlds, both in terms of level and world maps in terms of planets, like they did a lot of cool stuff with that game.

And it all got overlooked because they put all of the marketing on the three new playable characters, only one of which was actually fun to play, which was Oddsock, because he was like leaning towards like the speed flow state type of level design, which is really cool.

And then toggle and swoop were not we're not very good, but they hinged all the marketing on that and not like all of the actual cool stuff.

But that game does, on top of which, like you said, it was a PS3 slash PS4 game.

That's what I was going to say, is that the fact that like putting aside anything else, it's the fact that it's a PS3 for crossover gen game that came out in like, what, 2015?

So 2014, it was year one.

So far, far, far enough in that they could have gotten away with making it just PS4, but they kept it on PS3 so that all of the things crossed over and it didn't work.

And it was a little buggy to bring things from PS3 to four, because also, I think all your levels were supposed to work, too.

The levels did.

All of the levels worked because they had that infrastructure from bringing all the levels from one into two.

And so they had all the levels from one and two and three.

And that that worked fine.

It was sort of the costumes and unlockable thing that was an issue mostly with.

So they did it in two different ways, because DLC was actually easier because they had like a thing to be like, OK, well, you bought this on the PlayStation Store.

We can check that.

We know that you have that.

But for the PS4 version of the game specifically, they had to, they did a thing where they checked your trophy list from one and two and like, depending on how, yeah, for how far you got in the trophy list.

Like if you got the trophy for getting all of the stuff, you got all of the stuff from one and two in three.

The thing is, this wasn't an issue in the PS3 version because they just did it the same way they did it in two, where they just it just detects the file and understands.

The issue was that they couldn't do that with four because you don't have the saves, you don't have.

It's the issue that modern games have, where like early Spider-Man remastered PS5 version, you had to upload your PS4 save via the PS4 game and then download it via the PS5 remaster to get your save to transfer because they didn't forward plan for that sort of stuff.

Point is, I've always felt bad for Sumo Digital because they got trashed for that game.

Like they got raked through the coals.

Yeah, for basically making what is in terms of creation and like community levels the best game.

Yeah, and then I mean, it's OK, which is a 3D world, the better.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then they got bought.

Like, I feel so bad for both Sumo and Sanzaru because it was like, oh, when I looked at Sumo and Sanzaru, I was like, oh, this is a modern day analog to like old Naughty Dog and old Insomniac.

Like these are the new like 3D platformer.

Like they can make good ones.

They can make they can make really good ones if they're given the resources to do so.

And then one got bought by Facebook and the other one got bought by Tencent.

And now it's another both gone.

Yeah, yeah, that's a fun spinoff is dying.

Sonic Boom is a weird spinoff, too.

That's another one.

Oh, yeah, Sonic.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a shuffle written down.

I completely forgot about the shuffles.

Like that's just kind of like a it's a weird Mario Party spinoff.

But Boom is like actually some franchise.

Yeah.

What's that?

What's the RPG that Sonic tried?

Sonic Chronicles made by BioWare.

Yo, I like Sonic Chronicles made by BioWare.

I believe you.

I don't believe that too, yeah.

It's got good action commands.

I like using the stylus.

I don't want to play Yakuza because I'm afraid of it.

I don't want to play the new ones because I don't know that I'm into the RPGs.

And then you play Sonic Chronicles and you're like, I like it when they touch pad.

Yeah, I mean, I like turn-based RPGs when they have action commands.

When they have action commands, I'm into them.

Good news.

The new Yakuza have that.

That's not well, I mean, genuinely.

They have Mario Party inputs, they have Paper Mario inputs, like straight up.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I will say, I think I love the Paper Mario inputs.

I really like the Mario and Luigi series inputs because they're more complex and harder to do.

There are some in that get pretty, it's not just like, it's not as simple as the Paper Mario ones.

It's to the point that Kiryu has an ability that one of his moves becomes, you just go into beat-em-up mode in the middle of the game.

That's awesome.

Like his alt is just, I'm going to start playing regular Yakuza because I'm Kiryu.

That's actually rad.

I respect that.

Speaking of rad, Rad is our Crubscriber question of the week, which you can ask once again by joining us either on patreon.com/crub or hitting the join button on YouTube or subscribing on Twitch.

Anything that gets you into the discord with the bonus perks will get you access to the Patreon Crubscriber question of the week.

Chris, you pulled one up earlier when we realized we were so prepared for this episode.

That they didn't have one.

That's true.

I did.

I thought it kind of fit in with the spin-off theme.

This is from when someone went around too many games and just asked some random people to put in questions, I think, because the name is A Friendly Patreon Patreon.

So whoever that is, thank you.

Thank you.

Their question is, if Crub was Isekai'd, what Chobi character would everyone become?

Justin would be the Genshin Impact Isekai character.

Which is to say, he'd be amnesiac, he'd be absent-minded, aloof, but all of his sentences would be very important.

Justin Nocuni would be very interesting.

God.

So, this question is a weird one because I assume that they mean just general anime tropes.

I don't watch Isekai, so I don't know if there's specific tropes to like Isekai anime specifically.

I genuinely avoid anything that is in Isekai, like the plague.

I hate that set up.

I'm glad you hate that, Brody.

It's overdone, and just give me...

If you want to do a fantasy world, if you want to do an original world, just do an original world.

Don't make Sonic comes from outer space to the real world.

Brody, I have to throw out, Brody, you had a Red Bull induced long form history lesson on Little Big Planet.

Yeah.

Which you could argue is in Isekai.

Yeah, you know what else is in Isekai?

Sonic and the Sixer Rings.

Did you know that's in Isekai?

Yeah.

Okay, well, that's actually a perfect thing though, because there's eight Did you Destin, right?

So which one's Carrie, the little eight year old?

Sorry, Kari.

So I question, because I don't know that there are enough Isekai tropes for the four of us to each pick a unique one.

Two anime tropes.

Well, yeah, because I mean, I feel like I would probably be the tsundere.

Yeah.

Okay.

Or as it's colloquially pronounced, the tsunder.

You'd be the protagonist's reason to stay in this world.

At the end of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, when you're like, I want to have sex with my Bulbasaur friend.

I'm gonna stay here.

It's me, I'm the Bulbasaur friend.

I thought that was just the me experience.

I didn't know we all had that.

Yeah.

Okay.

No, I didn't have a Bulbasaur.

That's a formative moment in society.

I just picked this one because it made me laugh.

I don't have an answer, so I'm just going to go off of that.

It's so sad at the end of that first Mystery Dungeon game when the story actually wraps up and you can evolve your partner and then they just become like an emotionless blank from then on.

And you're just like, you used to talk to me.

Thanks, Spidey Jones, for making me sad.

They have a couple lines that I think are unique, but only certain here and there.

Yeah, not much.

Chris, that's what happens when you feel like you have to change your partner.

True.

That's true.

You don't make partners change, you change together.

Niko would be the guy who's high the entire time.

That's the thing in Isekai, right?

Like the interest has to be just...

I mean, it's definitely been the thing in my life.

I think you're thinking of Harold and Kumar, which is not yet in Isekai.

It could be.

Well, they think it's in Guantanamo, so maybe that one was...

To get Isekai to Guantanamo!

That's kind of an Isekai.

We woke up in Guantanamo, babe.

Bro, I love every time in Astrobot when I click a new level and I get Isekai somewhere new.

To go in Guantanamo, gosh.

Astrobot in Guantanamo, you know, that's...

Isekai just means go somewhere now.

Every time you take public transit, it's like, I have an Isekai to search for.

I'm getting Isekai to work today, guys.

I've heard Justin say that on the subway, like when we've hung out together, like, we'll go in a boat.

I've Isekai into into Manhattan.

Please tell me you're making that up.

I hope not.

He's not denying it.

Gosh.

I'd be a tank in Isekai.

I don't know what that means, but I'd be a tank.

It's not Dungeons and Dragons.

So we didn't know a lot of them are.

A lot of them are like, you go into the video game world and now there's a healer and a tank and a DPS character.

I just want to.

So to come full circle on what this podcast was originally going to be this episode, which was us reading the dictionary.

We didn't explain what an Isekai is.

So Oxford's dictionary, Oxford's English dictionary says it is a fantasy subgenre featuring stories in which ordinary people are transported to a magical world.

So third street, in case you're in case you're unfamiliar, that is what that is.

Ten minutes into us answering that question.

It's just like, just give me give me the world from the ground up day one.

Don't make it like connected to ours in a weird parallel universe thing.

It just makes it boring.

The only time it was cool is when it was a twist in FMA 03.

I don't even know what you said.

Chris would get Isekai into the Free Gunnership.

Yeah.

That'd be fun.

Kevin would be the Plato Gun.

Could you?

What's Free Gunner would I be?

No, I don't know that you would, because you'd be, this is like a horror movie, Isekai, so you'd be Isekai into the Free Gunnership, but they're all sitting there quiet because the game's offline.

No jobs going in this week, are they?

Where's our new cut scene?

Did I get to talk to Red Guy?

That's true.

He likes poetry.

I don't think that Red Guy can live up to the reputation, though.

I feel like he's going to be disappointing.

You'll get to meet the Amazon Prime Red Guy, the other Red Guy.

Oh, the other Colossian, yes.

We'll see what his deal is in the center.

That's what it was.

Colossian.

His name is Starchild.

He's a proud Colossian.

That was the message.

I would play as a Colossian in the Pokemon Civ game.

French.

We have not answered this question outside of just me and the main protagonist.

OK, who would be the antihero?

That's the question.

I think we've already answered it.

That'd be Bentley.

Yeah, Bentley.

Bentley the Turtle?

I'm here now.

If the astrobot-

I have sucked in a void with you guys.

That's weird.

I was trying to make a new time portal to get Sly out of Egypt, and then I ended up here.

Is time travel just Isekai then?

I mean, no, but then sometimes.

Kind of, though.

Sometimes it's like, you get-

I died, but I got hit by a truck and I got transported back to 1537 in medieval England.

Yeah, that'd be kind of cool.

The Cooper van got trapped on 3rd Street.

Just do time travel.

Don't make them die.

Don't make them get transported.

Why?

It's like, okay.

That'll be 1387.

If you could Isekai up to the second window.

Is Doom an Isekai?

Is Doom?

The game Doom?

Is that Isekai?

The first time someone came up with that idea, it's like, okay, cool, right?

Or the first time someone was like-

Dude, he just hates fun.

We get it.

No, and the first time it's like, oh, you get transported into the MMO or whatever.

It's like, cool.

That's a neat, novel, original idea.

And now you go on Crunchyroll, and 99% of the shows have a long ass light novel title, and they're all, I got transported into another world, and now I'm a vending machine.

Brody, Brody, you ready for this?

That sounds awesome.

That's a real one.

That's a real one.

That's quality entertainment.

The Game Boy games with Crash and Spyro, those are Isekai games.

So Spyro-

Spyro Orange and Crash Purple?

Yes.

What's that trick?

They get transported into each other's magical world, and they're normal people in their world.

Okay, wait, are you saying that Jimmy Timmy Power Hour is an Isekai?

It is also Isekai.

Yeah, because Jimmy doesn't have two arcades.

That's not Isekai, that's just a multiverse story.

Isekai is like a specific subgenre.

Different universe fantasy.

The Avengers is an Isekai.

Oh, okay.

I'm starting to get it.

Yeah, you know what?

Well, Sonic is a reverse Isekai, because you're a, like, Sonic movie.

You're a magical character transported via ring portal by owls into a normal world.

So I would be Knuckles, because I like Doritos.

That does happen.

He lifts those down.

Because I was thinking during the spin-off thing, like, oh, there's Secret Rings and Black Knight, but those are also Isekais, technically.

I'm just-

Trying to get sucked into the book.

Does he get sucked into the book?

I thought that the second one, he's just there.

I thought it was just like telling a story.

In the second one, he gets sucked into the book and to bring it full circle, the end, he was giving it as a reason to why he's late on a date with Amy, so it's like, oh, did he make all this up?

But then the King Arthur book title changes to Sonic of the Black Knight.

So what you're saying-

No, no, Brody, so what you're saying is that the end of Pirate Yakuza is gonna be Majima being late for a date with Amy.

Could be.

Yeah.

At least in Sonic's case, it's like, it's almost like an arc in an anime where it just happens.

It's not the premise of the series.

It's not the premise the IP is based on.

It's the premise of the story.

Like, like I don't complain in in Yu-Gi-Oh!

When they go into the video game.

You're going to be the complainer character, it sounds like.

Brody, I need you to answer.

You're gonna be the Glasses nerd emoji character.

You're really bringing in emojis.

I'll be Izzy from Beyblade, I'm down with that.

This isn't really an Izzy from Digimon, because isekai's are all bad.

I'll be Izzy from Digimon, I'm down with that too.

Yo, give me that beat juice.

Wait, were they named Izzy and Beyblade, or was I just thinking of the one from Digimon?

No, they were also Izzy and Beyblade.

I don't know why I remember that.

There's no world where I care, not even an isekai one.

So, if you haven't reviewed our podcast yet, I hope you did an hour ago, because you may not want to anymore.

Tell us who we should be in isekai game, Liam.

That would age well in the podcast review, actually.

You scroll down and there's one that's so much funny, and one that's like, oh, he's just like the guy and I got sucked into a vending machine part 2.

Why this vending machine got a grippy?

That's the line we're ending this on.

I don't know what else we...

Thank you for tuning in to this highly prepared episode of the Crubcast.

It's coming out piping hot right into your audio feeds and video feeds.

I hope you liked this week's dose of controlled chaos.

More so...

Controlled?

More so chaos than control this week, but that's okay.

I think we're okay with that.

We will see you next week for more crubbing.

As always, we still don't have an outro.