Yo, what's up? Welcome to the Kind of Funny Gamescast for Tuesday, March 18th, 2025. I'm your host, Blessing, Addy Oye Jr. Joining me is WWE Legend.
Greg Miller. That's right, Blessing. How are you? Good to see you.
This coat. If you're an audio listener, stop what you're doing. Pull over to the side of the road. Turn on the YouTube video.
Because this man's got a peacoat. And he's fucking crushing it out here. Yeah, I think I got a Mac Moore's book. I went to the thrift store.
Let me tell you. I guess it's up there. Yeah? I guess it's up there for a decade.
I'll let you sit. I mean, probably like 30 bucks. Yeah. Also joining us, of course, is the CEO Jr., Bear Courtney.
I'm very hungover. I'm not even going to hide it. I'm so fucking hungover, y'all. I'm very excited.
What about the mix? No, from the mid-max meetup. Hang out with the homies. Met the homie Charlie for the first time last night.
Part of the Nasty Boys. You know, the Nasty Boys, you know, like Charlie, all of them. Better we don't know. Better we don't know.
Whatever. Where does he? You know, hanging out with the homie Janet as well. And meeting Sarah for the first time and all that stuff.
So, yeah, it was a fun time. But, yeah, it was nice. Review this for two hours and you're all set. Fuck.
Also joining us, we have special guest, Tegan, a.k.a. Lightweight Gaming, returning to the show. So happy to be back. Thank you.
Yeah, of course, you've been on, I believe, PSLV and X-Cast in the past, is that correct? Yes. Yep. And you're here to talk about some Assassin's Creed shadows.
What's your history with Assassin's Creed? So, I am a big Assassin's Creed fan. Origins is my favorite, which I don't know how a lot of people feel about that, but I feel very strongly. I also, we built our honeymoon around the locations for Brotherhood, too.
Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Another one of my favorites that people don't typically like, so I'm going to get a lot of and unprepared, but Unity and Syndicate are some of my other favorites as well, so I feel like I bring a slightly different take, which I'm excited for. We'll see.
Well, I'm excited to talk to you and this panel to talk. I don't know. I just got lost. I know.
I'm waving over here as well. I'm also slightly hungover from last night as well, because, yeah, I did the mid-max meetup, and then I went to the mix, where I had two more glasses of wine, and I always try one glass of wine. This wine hits different for me nowadays. It's messed up.
Now that you're 30. Now I'm there. Now I'm different. Now let's talk about Assassin's Creed, because remember, this is the Kind of Funny Gamescast.
Each and every weekday, we get together and talk about the biggest reviews, and topics in video games live on YouTube, Twitch, and on podcast services all around the globe. If you love what we do, support us with the Kind of Funny membership on Patreon, YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, get all of our shows ad-free, watch us, record them live, and get a daily exclusive show. For a change, if you're part of the show, submit your thoughts and opinions as you do to be chats as we go. I'll speak for you.
We're in 11-person business, all about live talk shows. KPD, right before this, was about PlayStation's big new games that they're working on. After this is the Kind of Funny Podcast, and after that is a Nuzlocke Girdle stream with Nick, Roger, and Joey. It's just Nuzlocke.
It is just a Nuzlocke stream with Nick, and it's just Nick. Joey also on the ropes, I believe. I'll be on the ones and twos, hungover, being there as emotional support for Nick, as he is lost without both Andy and... Well, he's never played Pokemon before, and then we just tossed him in.
He's only better than the types of games. I ever matter, huh? You're leaving, too. I know, but you said he's lost without Nick and Andy.
Mike and Andy, but yes. Is this like a situation where he's just grinding, or is he actually going to try to... We'll find out. Nick will sit down and play for an hour, and then he'll decide what he's trying to accomplish.
Will we go back to the wall, probably. My favorite was the subreddit thread of just like, he's wasting so much money, why is he spending money like this in the game? I can only imagine how painful it is to watch a 40-plus-year-old man play a game for a 12-year-old. And lose half the party.
At least the last part of the last stream. And let me tell you, if you haven't been watching the Nuzlocke, you gotta check out the Nuzlocke. If you're a kind of funny member, you can get today's Greg Wave, which is... I'm gonna do it on the way to GDC.
This morning I had a rough morning, so it came in. Didn't have it ready to give. Check that out when it goes up later. Of course, thank you our Patreon producers, Xeleney Twining, Carl Jacobs, and Omega Buster.
Terror, Rocky, Shady, Rays, MeUndies, and Factor. But we'll tell you about that later. For now, let's start with the topic of the show. Assassin's Creed Shadows.
A game that was supposed to come out last November, got delayed into this year, got delayed into February, and then got delayed again into March. Finally, it is coming out. Finally, people at this panel have played it, are ready to talk about it. To give a quick synopsis, of course, people know what Assassin's Creed is, people know what Assassin's Creed Shadow is.
But to set the stage, I'm pointing to the Steam description here. Experience an epic action-adventure story set in feudal Japan. Become a lethal shinobi assassin and powerful legendary samurai if you explore a beautiful open world in a time of chaos. Barrett, you are the Assassin's Creed guy here.
He's the M's. I'm not gonna start with you. I'm gonna let this marinate for a second. Greg, I'm not gonna start with you.
Tegan, I'm starting with you. Now, Assassin's Creed Shadows has had a lot of hype going into it, I'd say, for the simple fact that it's the Assassin's Creed that everybody's been asking for. Takes place in feudal Japan, lets you see a right shit. Tegan, for you, does Assassin's Creed Shadows live up to the hype of what we've been building towards with it?
Well, I just checked, and I'm 70 hours in and two trucks away from the Platinum. Wow. Now, for you as an Assassin's Creed fan, what are your overall thoughts here about it? Overall, this is my second favorite just under Origins.
Obviously, it is not a perfect game. I have things that I would like to point out that I would like to have improved on it. But overall, I absolutely loved it. I loved some of the characters and their storylines, and I couldn't put it down.
That's the reason I have 70 hours in it. Oh, yeah. Now, on the kind of funny scale, of course, we work off of a 20-point scale, technically a 19-point scale. But, you know, I think a .5 can exist.
I agree. What about a 10-point class? No, that's not that. So we have the kind of funny scale, which you can see if you're watching the video version here, right?
Where 10 is master's, 9 is amazing, 8 is great, 7 is good, and so on and so forth. What would you give Assassin's Creed Shadow out of 10? I would give this a 9 out of 10 for myself. I think it was an amazing game.
It lived up to the hype that I had, for sure. Oh, yeah. Regularly, what do you think about Assassin's Creed Shadows? What a big question, Blessing.
Thank you for asking it. You know, we've been through the ringer with Assassin's Creed Shadows, right? I once saw it at SGF when they did the presentation alongside Outlaws. I liked what I saw.
They talked a lot about how it was going to be a very modern Assassin's Creed. They had a whole bunch of new ideas, yada, yada, yada. Then you jumped to Bear and I doing the hands-on preview, which was, what, four hours, six hours, whatever. And Bear and I both came back and went, yeah, it's Assassin's Creed.
It's Assassin's Creed, which is not a bad thing. It's just Assassin's Creed. I am going to abstain from giving a score on Assassin's Creed Shadows. Well, hear me out, right?
I'm 13 hours in. My take on this is using the colloquial words here, not using an adjective to actually sign a score, because I don't think I played enough to do that. Assassin's Creed Shadows is a good game. I just don't think it's good enough.
I think it might just be that I'm officially burned out on the Assassin's Creed formula. There's a lot of reviews up. They're all positive. There's many positive reviews up, right?
We're seeing a lot. It's an 82 on Medicritic right now. Something that resonated with me was DualShockers, which is the most negative one I've seen so far. It's a 5.5 out of 10.
Scroll the way back at the top. The writer is Ethan Krieger. Ethan's closing remarks, right? His final outro here.
As he gets ready to give his verdict, I'm scrolling back because it's a very long review. Good job. He's inviting me so much. But he goes, Assassin's Creed Shadows is a loaded collection of uninspired quests that quickly turned into a repetitive, boring grind.
I'm on the other side of where Tegan is, where I, every time I put down Assassin's Creed Shadows, I wasn't excited to pick it back up. I was excited to play something else. I didn't. I commit to what I'm reviewing or playing, right?
I had a week with this game based on how a schedule struck out. My thing about it was, there's a very definitive point of, I won't be picking this game back up. It's going to get uninstalled when I get back to my playstations. But there's a point last night where I was playing.
I was like, okay, I was running around playing this as Greg Miller plays open world games. Cool. They have it back broken up into zones where it's like, this is, you know, the level you should be or what the level the enemy is going to be here, the ones that are too crazy or red, right? And if I could, I was running to every one of those synchronization points and setting it off and having my towers ready to go.
Blah, blah, blah. And last night there was a thing where it's like, all right, cool, you got to go talk to this person. And I said, all right. And I threw up in the map and that quest was all the way across the open world.
And I had, it's well beyond where I was with my points. And I looked at it and I'm like, ah, like I am not looking forward to the horseback ride all the way over there. I already in 13 hours had my fill of synchronization points. I've had my fill of going into the enemy camp stand.
All right, I got to find five of these leaders to take out to them, get the chest to do this. And I'm like, ah, I just don't want to do that. And that was the thing for me. It's like, there's nothing wrong with this game from my limited time with it to say like, it's broken.
It's this, it's that. Combat is enjoyable. The world is gorgeous. They're doing a lot of fun things in there.
I'm not vibing with the story. I think there's very much like, this is Assassin's Creed, put it into the future of Japan. Like these are the, like, I know this mechanic from the other ones I played. I know what I'm doing.
I got to go discover this guy. And there's good and bad to all that. But it was just the thing of like, I saw that last night. I'm like, no, I'm good.
I'm not craving this. I'm full. Barrett, I'm going to throw to you. But before I do, I want to talk a little bit about me.
So originally I wasn't going to be on this review. But then the other day at work, I looked at you, Barrett, and I was like, man, y'all are gatekeeping a little bit. Y'all are gatekeeping. Because the deal with me in Assassin's Creed is that I've never been an Assassin's Creed person.
I remember back when I was in college, my friends James and Stevie, they loved Assassin's Creed. They'll talk about the Assassin's Creed lore. They'll talk about, what's the name of Homeboy that was like in modern day that was going on. Desmond.
Desmond. Come on, never forget. Desmond. They'll talk about like a modern day story and like the theories around it.
And they were hyped into Assassin's Creed. So much so that it infected me a little bit of, oh, I should check this out. I should play this game. So I borrowed Assassin's Creed 1 from James.
Played all the way through it. Struggled through it. Not that it was hard, but mostly just that I wasn't loving it. I was kind of bored going through it.
Finished it. And they're like, all right, but Assassin's Creed 2. It's like, where it gets good. You should check out Assassin's Creed 2.
Yeah. And I started playing it. I was like, oh, it's a new Mario. I like that joke.
And then I got further into it. I just couldn't do it. Assassin's Creed just wasn't working for me. I tried dipping into Black Flag when that came out.
And there's something about the Assassin's Creed franchise. I mean, there's a deep discussion we have about it. Because it is, I think, that you saw the open world formula. The kind of like checkbox nature of it that doesn't necessarily resonate with me.
So I've been out of the Assassin's Creed game forever, essentially. And, you know, ever since I go to Tsushima, I've been in the mind of like, maybe I'll check out this new Japan one. Because I do like the setting. I do like that direction for an open world.
That seems like it'd be fun in the Assassin's Creed world. And a few nights ago, I'm hanging out. I hang out with my friend Avery, right? And we're looking for a game to play.
And we're trying to figure out, like, all right, I'll play this game for you. It's like a tough Souls kind of thing. I don't know if that's going to be enjoyable for you to watch her first play together. She starts playing Lost Records.
And it's like, all right, I don't know if I'm feeling this. And I told her, I'm like, I got Assassin's Creed downloaded. For the record, maybe all size review code. I'm not breaking a burger.
Oh, you aren't. But, you know, we're like, you broke out the NBA. I was just like, oh, yeah, I played prologue. You should check out the prologue, see what's up.
So I start playing through, and I get to the end of the prologue. Probably takes about an hour and a half to get there. And I was shocked by how into it I was. The world is beautiful.
The game is beautiful. The combat early on, I was like, oh, I'm kind of feeling this. I kind of like where this is going. But intro of it, like, you're learning a little bit about Yasey's character, learning a little bit about Naoi's character, and kind of like getting a feel for the world.
It reminded me of watching Shogun back when that got on Hulu. Of course, not that it's like one for one of like the seriousness of Shogun and like how grounded that show is, but there's something there in terms of setting and world that has already grabbed me. The premise is really good, I think, for the prologue. That's what came out of the preview with me, though.
Yeah, it's a right now I'm going to play for. I'm excited to play more. I'm not saying I'm going to stick with it forever, but this is the most excited I am to play in Assassin's Creed. Now, Barrett, for you, as somebody who's played all the Assassin's Creed Creed's ranks in review for a kind of funny comment.
Maybe we'll get an update on that later. Assassin's Creed Shadows, what does it do for you? It's interesting, right? Like, we haven't just been waiting for this game for six months.
We've been waiting for Assassin's Creed Shadows for a decade at this point, right? Like, in the fervor of Assassin's Creed when it was at its popularity peak with like Black Flag and like the PS3, Xbox 360 generation, fans have been begging for feudal Japan, the Assassin's Creed. And I think after a decade-long wait, I really wish they made the game back then. And I feel like the anticipation for this game kind of reached a level that I don't know if it was ever going to live up to what we've built up in our heads as fans.
I think very often Shadows is a game that doesn't know what it wants to be in terms of gameplay, in terms of exploration. I think a lot of mechanics are singular good ideas, but then will conflict with other things that kind of take away from the exploration of the world in terms of playing around with gameplay mechanics, taking out castles, camps, all that stuff. And in terms of story, I think there's a lot of promise there, but I don't think it fully lives up to what it sells the very first like two hours. And I only finally got very invested in it in the last five hours of the game, and then the game ended.
And I was like, oh man, this is what the entire story should have been as an Assassin's Creed fan. And I think it's just very interesting that the promise of feudal Japan Assassin's Creed, it was like, I want to see that world and that lore of Assassin's Creed injected into this kind of era, right? And I think the game spent so much time trying to shy away from that, and I feel like it pulls the punches a lot. And so with all that, I think Assassin's Creed Shadows is a 7.5 good.
I had a good time with it. I don't think it's a bad game. I just think it has a lot of interesting and confusing choices made that kind of get in the way of the fun a lot of the times. And yeah, as far as like the open world stuff, of the open world Assassin's Creed, I think it's the weakest of the modern Assassin's Creed games.
So overall thoughts. Wow. I'm going to stop myself there, because now I feel like I'm just like talking. So I want to go back to Tegan, because now that we've done the overall thought, I want to get into the specific elements of this.
I want to talk about story, I guess, to start off, right? Because I think a lot of people go to the Assassin's Creed games to get to know the characters, get into the quests and enjoy the stories of the quests and do all these different things, right? Taking it on the narrative level, did you enjoy the story of Assassin's Creed Shadows? What did that do for you?
I did. I will say it took me a while to get into it, so I totally see where Greg is coming from with the first, I would say, Act 1. I really loved Noway's character, but you were pretty much locked into one character for almost the entire first act. And while I liked your character, I wanted to also play as the other one.
I wanted to see what that other character was all about. I wanted to see the story. So I don't think I really started falling in love with the story until Act 2. The end of Act 1, there's a big crescendo moment that really solidified, like, okay, I'm invested.
I want to know where this is going. I want to keep playing this. And it did have those big story beats that absolutely caught my attention and absolutely made me want to keep playing. I think part of the downfall and part of the criticism I do have for it is the golden path, like the main storyline, is not necessarily clear.
There was one point towards the end where I still hadn't rolled credits, but I felt like I should. And I was like, I don't know what I need to do in order to roll credits. And typically, I'm not necessarily one who's playing a game just to try to roll credits. But with a review, you know, I wanted to try to beat it so that I could talk about it.
And I wasn't exactly sure, okay, what's the main story? What's side content? What do I actually need to do? So I think I do have some positives about that, but that also took away from the story a bit because some of those storylines weren't the strongest.
So I think the main story really does shine, especially at one point, it does a little offshoot of a main story for Yasuke, an offshoot of a main story finale, and those two in particular, especially Yasuke's really, really, really amazing stories. I teared up at one point with Yasuke's story and got goosebumps all over my body, and I was so excited. But because there isn't necessarily that clear golden path with the story, sometimes it gets a little muddled, and then you're like, wait, is this actually as good as I think it is? And then you realize, oh no, I've been doing side content, maybe that's why I don't like it as much.
Let me go back to this main thing and get back on this main path. But it does get a little confusing sometimes about what you actually need to do as part of that main story. I want to bring it to Super Chat. I want to throw this one at Greg.
It says Sanders right then. It says, if I'm not tired of the UESOT formula, will I like it, you think? Again, I'm not saying it's a 4.5 or something like that, right? If I'm saying it's good, it's not good enough for me, which does, without doing it, put me in the sevens range.
So yeah, I think you would. Again, it strikes me so much, jumping in and playing this, I was immediately like, oh man, this is doing what... of ronin did for me in a way where it's like cool this is just check let's go over there do that i just think the traversal was more fun in rise of ronin did we ever get a wingsuit in this like we did in assassin's creed 2 right yeah no i think that was like the biggest thing right get up to these high points and sink and i'd be like man i wish this is rise of ronin where i could just jump off and go over there like i can't i slowly go back down and find him jump i mean let's be frank i mean this is a better game like i enjoyed rise of ronin for what it was you go back and watch that i think this is an interesting one where if you go back and watch that piece i love you i think where we review rise of ronin i'm i was like i like slop give me slop give me the checklist give things to do it's the fact that i think the open world segment of rise of the ronin flowed better than this one does yes my problem here is going up sink the point all right cool now i slowly come back down okay now i need to get out of there's points over here you get these giant encampments you gotta find the five bosses or whatever and i could not i've asked you one point i was playing on the couch am i missing is there a power up or a special like i can't find this last guy i've been running around and i found him finally i killed him and then i was like okay cool now i gotta get out of here so i go over the wall and i come back down and i jump into the water and i swim in the water all right where can i actually climb up this wall i climb up here there's another boat jump in the water come back down like this isn't cool and i can't fast travel out of it because it's an enemy encampment so it's still red these are is this nitpick you go to negative black games no i'm telling you what broke the traversal cycle for me where it didn't feel effortless like i never had this problem in rise of the run and i never had this problem in ghosts i didn't have this problem in odyssey like i adore odyssey because even if all hollow was too big of a game i felt it went on too long i have so many positive remember remember this positive remember jesus christ i'll let you i never roll credits but i put like 55 hours into it uh this game like assassin's creed games are all about especially these modern ones all about exploration and this game does so much to make exploration not interesting or not captivating uh a lot of like there's so many goddamn points in this game uh and every time you go up to one you look around and it's just the kind of it's just question marks and then like that's fine it's like okay there's a sense of mystery like there's a thing to do over there or maybe not maybe it's just a town uh and that's just what the question mark is um but then like the landscape none of it is naturally like interesting like oh there's like a thing here that would want me like draw me you know like the what is it that's a rule of three or whatever there's always like three things that you can see like walking around that like interest you and engage you into going and exploring um this game doesn't really have that they really leaned into making japan feel very realistic to like this part of japan uh a lot of mountains uh a lot of just like trees to look at and stuff um and i think with that it just leaning so heavy into that i think gets in the way of what modern assassin's games did so well which is exploring around getting lost and you know constantly finding something that you're engaged with and the things you are finding uh throughout there's a lot of just like rinse and repeat activities that after a couple of times you're like you know one or two times of like praying at shrines finding shrines or you know finding these lost pages let's find these lost pages that aren't interesting collectibles god forbid they have like historical facts on them or like lore or anything not just lost pages so to jump back in here this is again where i was like oh man this isn't gonna be one for me where it was these things when i got there and i saw the i go all the way over there and i saw the question marks and the untamed map it wasn't that excitement i can't wait to get to that same point and see what's there it was like i know what's going to be there it's gonna be a burned out house that i climb up and look around like okay cool and again that's not bad i think if i don't know i don't i don't because i still love open world games i still love checklists i don't think this is the indictment of it it's just that i didn't think it was fun to go from point a to point b i will say going off of that um the other thing is too it gives you an option where it will give you like the line on the ground to follow if you select where you want to go and you absolutely needed that because this is the first ac game in a long time where you couldn't just go off-roading anytime i tried like there was one time i almost had like a skyrim moment because i ended up sliding down a hill because you can't find anything that's not meant to be climbed so i started sliding down the and i flung in the air like i had gotten hit by a giant skyrim and um i thought it was the funniest thing but after that moment i was like okay i really cannot be going off-roading and climbing up these hills you really have to follow the designated paths which um again i feel like i'm saying a lot of negative things but i really do love this game i have more positives i promise but um you really do have to follow that line and go where that line wants you to go because the foliage is so dense like barrett said they made it look very realistic and feel very realistic from this region of japan like for the topography uh but that makes it really impossible to go off-roading um which one of the things that i really liked about valhalla odyssey origins was that you could kind of go wherever the heck you wanted to go um you couldn't really do that here yeah i'm running up and sliding and falling down then exploration feels so linear and that being in an open world game i think it's just that's what i talked about in the beginning i feel like it's so conflicting with this weird choice i feel of all right cool i'm right there with you i'm like okay cool i've learned my lesson i can't just climb over the mountain which sucks but i want to get the thing i throw down the line which already feels too hand-holy for me but then i'm like all right i've gone that far i then let go of the six i'm like oh it's not auto follow like the horse isn't going to go on like so many games do that where you can hold it but i actually have to just now just pushing the horse along the white line like this sucks even more yeah which i think correct me if i'm wrong i think you could do auto like pathing i thought so too because i was like my muscle memory tried to turn it on and then my horse stopped moving i was like wait why am i not following this path like i want to eat my snack exactly because again the world's beautiful but like no i do want to hear some of your positives right i think you came out of this as i sound like the person who's like the most you know high on assassin's three shadows um what are some of the things you like the most about the game um i really i loved the characters i know i had mentioned the main story was really good but i really i fell in love with yosuke in that way i loved how they interacted with each other um i thought the world itself was absolutely beautiful and where i differ with like barrett and greg um i found going to those question marks i really enjoyed doing that because i felt like it actually had purpose to it for me um yes it was disappointing you couldn't read those pages i thought okay if you're gonna have me like pages at least put something short on there like hey this shrine you worship buddha or something you know like something something small um and they did have that in other capacities but again if you're gonna make me collect those sheets give me a little something um but they did lead to things like knowledge points which you need if you want to unlock the next tier of the skill tree uh they did lead to with there's this one little meditation spot that leads to many games which gets really freaking hard by the way i felt like such a moron for some of them i was like i cannot do this it took me way too long um but those sometimes led to little flashback uh side quests which i thought were really cool and sometimes just like a little haiku or a little anecdote or something like that but i still found enjoyment out of those um so i i like going to the question marks but i do agree it was a pain in the ass to get to them sometimes because you really just had to follow and then there's one trophy where it's like it's the highest point of the map and i was overthinking it i was trying to find the mountain that was going to be the highest and you can't offer us like how the hell am i supposed to get up there and i totally over thought it was much simpler than i was making it but um so i thought they improved the exploration from valhalla one of my things was too bloated there's too many things that didn't do anything for me um and with this if i was finding stuff i could use it to upgrade my um armor my my skill points my abilities and that sort of thing so i thought that they really trimmed that down um and then i like how it they blended the stuff in action i i love syndicate with the two characters but there's no reason to switch between the characters like i want to play as evie there's no reason for me to switch i want to play with this there absolutely is a time and place to play as each character um depending on how you want to tackle something and i think they did a really good job in my opinion of um having situations where you know okay now is definitely better for this okay yeah it's definitely better for this and you can choose how you wanted to play it uh and i thought it was really interesting i was quickly like scanning through some reviews before i went live here and um some people were like oh no just do now it was just you can tell it's taylor for now and i was like that's interesting because i felt like that was taylor towards yasi so i think it really depends on how you want to play it um and those two characters felt so different so i actually was taking time to say okay do i want to play now then now i'm gonna get my bucket so do i want to just go on um swords blazing if you will uh so all those things i think they definitely improved on and i'm gonna stop talking because i've been talking too long no i'm gonna i'm gonna go back to you in a second i do want to talk about like you know the now and i'll see aspect of it and you know you know you mentioned that you really like syndicate i know barrett uh your favorite uh the syndicate is the best one yes what's your favorite okay but it's actually the best actually the best one so i do have questions about the dual protagonist that's my man but before we get there i want to tell you about patreon.com slash kind of funny and youtube.com slash kind of funny games where you can go and get the kind of funny membership which allows you get shows ad-free and speaking of ads let us tell you about our sponsors this episode is brought to you by shady rays get ready for the season ahead with quality shades built to last our friends at shady rays have you covered with premium polarized shades that won't break the bank shady rays is an independent sunglasses company offering a world-class product rated five stars by over 300 000 people plus if your shades ever go missing or an unexpected hit happens you know don't sweat it they have the most insane protection in all of eyewear every pair is backed by lost or broken replacements if you don't love your 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were saying earlier that there's a long time where you don't get to play as yasuke and i think that's a very weird decision to introduce him and then be like oh you like that fuck you you're not gonna be able to play for 12 hours like okay cool um but in a gameplay sense when you get to finally play as him again there is this like level of power fantasy that comes along with yasuke where you know uh when you get caught as now and you uh have are forced into fights like even a two-on-one can be a little bit like uh of a rough time if you get like one kind of thing wrong in terms of yeah or someone's got armor and stuff like that and then it plays yasuke and you're you're messing up like six seven dudes all at once uh it feels good it feels really fun to play as and i i do agree is that i think the a lot of uh level design or castle design camp design stuff feels well designed for both of them uh if you want to play as one or the other i was spending a lot of time in the last like 10 hours kind of like deciding to play as yasuke in camps i like you know assassin's creed i like playing stealthy i like doing all that stuff and uh mastering all of that but i was like okay i'm gonna do this on purpose and um yeah playing as him there's a different type of exhilaration in terms of just like messing dudes up and then also not being able to have like the was it the eagle sight or whatever like you don't get to tag people the same way um and so there's like a there's a fun level of just like oh who's around the corner type of thing like is it gonna be five dudes is it gonna be a solo dude is it gonna be a big dude you know and so i think that's what i have a question based on the one the only the dawn imran khan who was popping off on the loose guy today talking about this he said because i i when i i have a lot of yasuke i got direct when i did all that but it was i think anytime the choice popped up i'm like i'm committed i'm now i mean i've come this far i've leveled it up i know what i'm doing i enjoy the gameplay again like it'll never not be fun to hide the bush whistle stabs me in the face come through you know what but imran put this out there i don't i want to know from both you uh the addition of yasuke makes the game more fun in terms of battles but also undercuts now his gameplay why would i sneak around in enemy camp picking off guards one by one when yasuke can literally run kick people across the camp 20 minutes sections become one minute which kind of sucks i think my rebuttal to that is like they're to me at least they're both fun so it's like whatever you're in the mood for like if you want to like slowly uh and methodically take people down like i don't think having the option to do the other way it takes away from that um i think that it just gives you the option because here's the other thing is that realistically you could kind of do that in the other games too like an odyssey and valhalla it felt like especially like the two sides that yasuke and now a uh kind of represent in terms of these modern assassin's creed games were boiled down to one character in the last couple of games so you could go into a camp and just start messing people up if you wanted to they just designed it in a way to like if you're going to go into a camp you're locked into one and so i i personally i find that a bit more interesting than uh having both uh accessible to you at all times so that's my takeaway yeah it really just came down to what do i feel like doing at this moment um and i also it depended on the season too because i thought there were certain seasons that were more fun to stealth in and certain seasons that were more fun to just go in um as yasuke and destroy everything talk to me about what was your favorite season to stealth in i so i thought spring and summer because you could go into rivers you could like breathe through a little reed to hide you had the grasses that were dead in the winter time but then on the other hand winter is really cool too because there was icicles and things everywhere so it's more of a challenge because if i was running on the rooftops there were the icicles well and all of a sudden now the ai i will say the ai was pretty smart in this in comparison to other assassin's creed games where if i kept um assassinating people from the rooftops they were starting to check the rooftops and then they were seeing me all the time i was like what the heck why are they seeing me why are they looking up and i was like oh well because if i was in real life getting murdered from the rooftops i would also check the um so i thought the seasons really uh depending on what you liked from the season would help kind of choose what path you want to take also i thought it was really funny because yasuke trying to run on ice was hysterical he would just slide all over the place um and but also he could run through snow where now it was really slow in the snow so i think with the different seasons with the different style gameplay you want to play it really is just to give you more options there isn't one reason like you have to play this one or the other it's what do you want to do and how can i give the player choice in what they want to do how they want to play this and i think they really did a great job of if you like something like mirage that was back to the stealth roots you can do that with now if you like something like valhalla and you wanted to just destroy everything um especially by late game by late game my yasuke in particular was so op i had this two moveset where i could literally just destroy people in two hits if they had armor and one if they didn't and it was awesome and i felt like a god and probably felt like what he would have really felt like in real life if he was cowering over all these people um so it really just came down to what do you feel like doing and how do you want to play and they gave you the option to do that and i really appreciated that i got a super chat from spilling the beans right and it says i'm in agreement with lightways review love that you're not punished for sticking with one character in the game shadows is my favorite after brother what it means what it means uh i want to talk about the direction of assassin's creed because you know ever since origins it feels like they took a step into making a bit more open a bit more bigger of a game like a bit more rpg elements are integrated a bit more right and uh as we've been going you know i've been i've always listened to kfg and those kind of funny stuff right before i worked kind of funny and i'll hear greg talk about the bloatedness right people in general honestly talking about like oh man these games are getting bigger and bigger to the point where it's like you're playing honesty and it's oh man i'm putting 80 hours into this thing um when we're talking about assassin's creed shadows how does this game how does this game uh i guess take the direction of assassin's creed do you play this one and go all right we're heading the right place or does it feel like we're standing in the same spot with it i i personally think we're it's not the same spot and i don't think it's the right place or the wrong place like i think in terms of map size this is maybe a little bit bigger than origins but it's incredibly dense there's a lot to do within a lot that they put in now granted is a lot of that stuff very rinse and repeat kind of doing the same stuff over and over again yes um and i think in terms of like my biggest hang-up with the open world is like the exploration and getting to those things i think is very hampered so i think it's a different spot that i don't know if i would want them to kind of repeat after this game but um yeah it's an interesting one i mean obviously my take on it is something tapping out on it would be that i feel like they're i feel a bit lost right now i think barrett talking about being a conflict experience is that my my push would be i'd want to see them bring this down and not go all killer no filler but i would i mean like i think i know this sucks to keep comparing these games but go to tsushima right i felt like it was such a great pace between hey here's all the stuff you can go do if you want to but it's also just fun to get the next thing here's the story you know that three sections there you go that's the game i would rather see something more condensed like that because again this for all of this game is where i'm like i ain't got 40 hours in me 70 hours i need to go do this and i'm not hooked in by the story enough to where i need to see that i feel like the story starts that prologue in the strongest characters up by the time we get back to yasuke as tiki pointed out the act one into act two finale does a really cool thing yeah oh boom this is the set that's like oh wow we're finally here yeah that is cool but it's again not cool enough where i'm like i want to put up with the rest of it even if and then i feel like i'm playing the game wrong as i've been told uh about when i made the blasphemous comment of saying i noticed that i was getting close to reviews i started doing just the main stuff people hate me hate me alive like oh my god i'm playing this game the way i play the games when i feel them but i'm not feeling in the loop anyways so then to sit there like well i'm just gonna run to every main objective i'm like that's gonna suck because they're far apart it's not like this one was i'm like ugh um in terms of the other direction i want to kind of talk about real quick just because i didn't get to talk about story um you know i think another interesting one with a lot of these modern assassin's creed games is that they've kind of gone away a little bit from like the assassins uh and but it always felt like there was a point to it right like origins is literally the origins of the assassin's creed right uh odyssey uh while there wasn't assassins that was a bit more hinting at the uh kind of early stages of the templar order coming together which was also cool and there's also like some isu lore uh in there as well and while there were assassins in uh valhalla you avor were just kind of homies with them but then that game also leaned heavy into like some deep lore stuff in terms of the one two came before and all this stuff and i think one of my frustrating one of my more frustrating uh points with this game is it feels so disinterested in being an assassin's game in terms of story um for a very long time and uh and i think that was kind of like one of my biggest hangouts was like damn like the reason people really wanted to see an assassin's creed feudal japan story was to see the assassin's creed world and lore injected in there and this game spent so much time trying to not do that and i don't know there's a whole thing in the very beginning you put the blade in the hole and turn it yeah oh cool and like i said earlier like there's a moment uh near the end of this game where i was like okay cool we're finally getting somewhere and i had this moment i was like damn there might be like another 10 hours of this game and then the game ended like an hour later it's like oh that's where we're ending like we're ending right as we get going like as an assassin's creed like nerd and who loves that shit like i was so let down by that uh and i think in terms of like the personal stories i think there's a lot of uh i really liked uh yasuke's like premise and like where he goes i think uh so little is done with that though throughout the game i think yasuke has like some really good like moments here and there but in like a game that took me 48 hours to beat uh it felt like way too few and far between and then now is is now is very much if you played in assassin's creed you know now is story uh and so in terms of that i was also let down a little bit um and so yeah yeah definitely took a while to get into the templar versus the assassin story and again i wasn't even sure if that's part of the main story like if i had to do that or if i had to do that content or like what i need to complete that versus what i didn't however once we did get into it i really did love it i love how they put the templars in um but there is it kind of ends randomly on a cliffhanger and i almost wondered if i did things in the wrong order because the ending i had did feel like a little anticlimactic when i rolled credits and i almost wish i ended with a different quest that was much more like whoa that would have been really cool if i ended there um so i don't know if there's a correct order or not but i felt like the way i did it i would have preferred if i had flip-flopped a couple quests but it does feel like okay there's gonna be a dlc and we're gonna answer a lot of questions in the dlc don't get me started on the main i just you awoke something in me that can't be how it ends and then there's like oh you know sometimes there's story mission after credits that's kind of how these modern assassin's free games have worked and i was like okay there's still there's still like a little bit more let's see where it goes and it ends with very much like i'm not gonna do this thing until i'm ready and i was so i i was angry i was very upset about like yeah that's cool don't make that a major point of the game throughout 40 hours and then leave it off of like dlc it's winky face yeah because i did feel like the main that felt like one of the main questions like what is going on here and then that was the one that didn't get answered and all the other ones did um so it's like okay well i definitely want to play the dlc because i want to see where the story goes but i almost wish they had left um like the templar story more as the um the dlc or something so that we could have some answers because we just didn't get any we just kept asking questions and asking questions and we really didn't get anything resolved with the assassin's storyline um i still really have fun with it and i thought the way they introduced it was really good but i i was definitely sad that it didn't get resolved now i want to address the elephant in the room right as we're talking about assassin's free shadows here i'll tell you what the elephant is its name ghost of tsushima all right i'm sitting here there's a green goblin basket that's speaking to me just like ghost of tsushima mentioned it talk about it let's compare it let's do all the things and i've been trying to purposefully mentioned ghost of tsushima already but i've purposely not uh been reading all of the ghost of tsushima which i'm getting because i don't want this to be about that game right but i am going to bundle them here right put them all in place of course we got one from carlos viegas who writes in and says valhalla is one of the few games i've 100% completed i haven't played all ac games and was about to start ghost of tsushima which should i play tundra boy also writes in and says ninja stuff in ghost is kind of mid how's it here and then there's one more of us roll down from brennan riley writes in and says barrett you are a scholar and a gentleman syndicate is my favorite is my second favorite after black flag how does shadow story compare to tsushima of course different questions about tsushima here starting from the top with the first person should they play this or should they play tsushima as someone who didn't beat tsushima uh because i was that came out around a rough time of like being burnt down on games for me yeah um i think i was also working on assassin street in review at that time too so doing another open world uh kind of game around that time was rough um i would play tsushima get ready for yota i mean obviously if you're a big assassin street fan then like if it's calling you play assassin shadows but if you're asking he's the biggest assassin street fan i guess from hearing both their perspectives we're trying to finger you i mean like what would you say see this is a tricky one um i will say i obviously just like everybody else had the fears that i was going to be comparing this to ghosts over and over again and i really do think they did a good job of distinguishing themselves through the music style like don't even get me started on music was so good i loved what they did with the music i thought the art style was great they have a lot of these moments that felt very tarantino um so very into a tarantino film i think there's a lot of this that you'll really like in terms of like the art direction um so i don't i don't i don't necessarily feel like you can say like you can compare them in that way if you want something that has like an amazing story go go tsushima if you want something that's really fun in terms of just like being an assassin or being a juggernaut samurai or something like that and you are an assassin's creed fan go the assassin's creed but i genuinely feel like there's a place for both so i'm gonna sit up in here to jump in and talk about it i agree with uh t and talk about the styles being different my issue is that i think from the 13 14 hours i played right that assassin's creed shadows dips their toe into it but never does it in terms of a style whereas like the opening prologue the setup like i texted bear that after night one i was like i enjoy this like i'm enjoying playing this like i don't know this is gonna bad the setup to it feels like a samurai movie what they do in that vlog right and i was like i'm excited for them to invest in that and then over that next 10 hours from those first whatever hours it's one of those oh this is still assassin's creed they're still telling it and cinematically showing everything in the assassin's creed way rather than the ghost way and there's a moment in uh the shadows where now wait no it's yosuke he's confronting somebody and the guy's like fight me like a samurai duel me like a samurai and they're like that age is fucking over and the other dudes lift their guns and i was like what that immediately did to me was like oh like it's shot like assassin's creed and it made me think of ghosts and how fucking dope it was every time you go into a battle and jim would just go and i was like i missed that i wish this chose a style uh tegan referenced it early on and no spoilers but i think i'm on the same page you can tell me if i'm wrong but there's a mini game in there where you have to hit buttons and they slowly fade away and it's a bit basic and as you do it it fades into this black and white it makes it look like a brushstroke painting and i was like this is so cool i wish they did this elsewhere i wish this was like i wish like in ghost you feel like you're in a world you're in this japanese feudal world whereas this i was like i'm in assassin's creed and that's not bad it's just not what this was i wanted more of that i wanted the samurai film too yeah and i think in terms of that too i think how some of that stuff is told uh in terms of story is also very frustrating like uh we mentioned there's like flashback stuff and i think they did that to avoid the intro being super slow but there are moments that are held for flashbacks that'll play like three minutes after a moment with a character and you're like well if i got the flashback first that moment that i just had with this character would have been more emotionally like uh like charged yeah and i just think like how they kind of roll out uh especially yasuke's story i thought was just kind of just all over the place and weird um you know uh addressing tundra boys question about the ninja stuff right they didn't enjoy the ninja stuff and ghosts how would you say the ninja stuff is here i mean it's assassin's creed i mean yeah that's their fucking bag so yeah this is a good game like once you get into the flow of you know taking out castles going around uh you know building your uh base which i definitely got lost in and making my base look cool as hell um you know it is fun and yeah like the stepping around uh being a shinobi cross assassin i think is uh really fun oh yeah can we talk about the hideout base building a little bit please um so i i loved it as well i thought it was so much fun buying different cosmetics and being able to like choose what i want a building to look like where i want to play some it was a nice progression from ravensthorpe so if you enjoyed it with valhalla i think you'll really enjoy it here um i also loved that anytime you pet an animal it unlocked in your camp so like jerry king waller would have loved my hideout because there's just puppies puppies everywhere and i literally had max a lot of puppies i could possibly have um but also you could have like an ox you could have a monkey you could have a pig like i loved that i had monkeys i had deer it was great oh so fun like the customization great i felt like improving the buildings actually had passive improvements on my gameplay but it was so jarring because the frames and i'm normally not a frame person i don't normally pay attention to that because that's like not something that i necessarily necessarily care about but it was jarring when you went into your hideout it dropped i don't even know it was 25 frames per second uh it was like where i was noticing it which you know it's like okay that still needs to be improved on you were playing on a base playstation or a pro wrestling or what were you on um a base playstation i'm not pro i didn't see you um yeah i was on normal ps5 yeah going from uh you know playing performance so going from 60 to what feels like sub 30 is very jarring i do think there's a lot of like back end things that are happening that maybe this uh this part of the game wasn't really uh quite ready for um in terms of coming out now which is crazy because it's been delayed over and over again but there i definitely had a few crashes working on my uh base but it was just so fun right away right it was so fun um in the cutscene after the prologue i picked it up yesterday because i was like right i want to play more you know like i really want to play more this game and i started the first cutscene and i just crashed and i was like that's fine i'm gonna go work on the show i'll be back hopefully i'll be back um a couple quick hits quick hit super chats for you snubs right then it says is there any magic folklore stuff in this one of course that's a spoiler you don't want to answer i see a lot of stuff asking about animus stuff too animus stuff is a little weird uh because obviously you know rest in peace assassin's creed infinity long live the animus hub um that stuff i didn't get as into there are activities that are animus related um that didn't feel it didn't feel very compelling and it felt weirdly like live service of like ah do this animus thing in the next six days or it'll just get this point so you don't like this outfit yeah so it's very much like that's what the animus hub is going to be uh that is what it's going to serve as an assassin's creed launcher even though it's not a launcher it's you're downloading shadows and it like is like your main menu and you get the option to launch other games from this game it's fucking weird animus hub god i love it it's so stupid um and then sorry what was the other uh magic folklore i wish there was much more uh there there definitely feels like nods to folklore stuff but um it doesn't lean into like valhalla did and i think valhalla did it in very fun ways flying penguins i can only think of one actual little side story that kind of dipped its toe into and introduced like a folklore character um other than that it wasn't a main component by any means uh got a super chat from flying penguins who says is there a transmog system how are the microtransactions transmog is great uh you know uh something i didn't realize until a couple days ago is that for weapons for transmogging you can transmog individual parts of the weapon uh like bob was saying in the chat like it feels very much like the jai games in terms of what you can change around for transmogging and then yeah like a lot of cool outfits in this uh i found very quickly uh the outfit that i wanted now to stay in so that was uh accessible for us for review which was great because i i think like they've been kind of weird about transmogging the launch of past games so it was good to have this uh this time around yeah you'll knock it short after you're going and then with microtransactions you paying for stuff um it's nothing out of the ordinary of assassin's creed since black flag right uh you can uh use uh you can pay for you know base building uh stuff which has kind of been the norm since black flag uh there's dlc or there's like outfits and stuff that you can buy stuff that looks silly and goofy and stuff like that maps that will help you out yeah yeah stuff like that that we've seen in the past assassin's creed game they don't shut it in your face which i do appreciate like i did have to kind of like search for that um and so if you want to ignore that stuff it's very very easy you can buy armor from a horse they do have like those animus moments that you can find in the game like you can find credits in the game almost and then you can do barrett you mentioned like little animus activities that will give you a different it's not a helix credit it's a different type of credit um that will unlock things that do feel microtransactiony but you're finding those in the game so it doesn't feel as bad um but then yeah it's exactly the same as the other ones where you can go and buy the really cool armor set that makes you look like a skeleton if you want or um you know makes your horse a dragon or something hell yeah fuck yeah let's go let's go let's go let's bear the horse armor um we're gonna call now with one more chat from gold catch here right then let's bear you got something oh i forgot i want to listen to your podcast on the podcast what's up everybody welcome back to assassin's creed interview everybody's favorite pod or uh interview series relegated to a podcast with a podcast last time we were here we reviewed and ranked the Assassin's Creed Mirage right now the ranking is number one Syndicate number two Valhalla number three Origins that's don't show that yet number four Black Flag I told y'all I took a bit of time yesterday to really think about this game because I have a lot of ups and downs with it something that I think is kind of persistent throughout the entire series and after much debates on where kind of in the middle of the list Kevin you cannot pull it up I have Syndicate at number 8 below wait no Kevin I see what happened here Kevin I like it Kevin he's on the ropes I put Shadows below Odyssey at number 9 but above Rogue so yeah it's kind of in that middle spot I don't think again 7.5 this kind of being more in the middle of the list I don't think it's a bad game I think a lot of the middle of this list is very solid games very enjoyable experiences sure fair enough a couple super tips to get us out here Jordan Aindal writes in it says for me this game is the perfect balance between old and new creed is it the Assassin's Creed in Japan I thought we would get after all those years no but the franchise has changed this balances only in new creed this balances I think both old and new creed well in my opinion and we have one from Volcash who says this sounds like the Horizon Zero Dawn of Open Worlds where I had lots of limitations and didn't feel fun until the second game improved at all Shadows has so many games taken inspiration from sounds like they didn't question mark question mark we'll catch you I don't agree with all your thoughts here but I respect I respect let's swing guys thank you so much for talking with me about Assassin's Creed Shadows and telling me all your thoughts are you going to go back here what's your plan I'm going to pick it up it's the tough thing of there's a lot of games coming out and so right now I have another game that I'm reviewing at the same time that's a bit more my speed and then also Xenoblade Chronicles X comes out this weekend I've been telling myself the entire year I'm going to finally play a Xenoblade game because this one has max in it so we'll see but I do want to pick it up maybe give it a few more tries and see if it sticks with me we'll see thank you so much for joining us thank you so much for having me back it's been great yeah is there a place where people can find you they want to check out some of your content that would be awesome if you like gameplay let's play videos you can find those that like gaming if you want to watch me watch your favorite movies that's that way reacting if you want to hear me talk more about video games you can find me on the Trophy Room PlayStation podcast hell yeah of course this as being the kind of funny games 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