The Giant Beastcast: Episode 234

I think the problem is Rouge One has a dull slow first half. The second half is really great just feels like two disconnected feelings. SOLO throughout is swashbuckling FUN time at the movies for all to enjoy. Its star wars for non star wars fans. I could show my sis who hates star wars SOLO cause the cast and the story is basic enough. Yeah on merits its just run of the mill but eh that sells. PS I only watched star wars 7, 8, and ROUGE ONE AND SOLO. I played the KOTOR game before that and still think KOTOR would make a great star wars movie with a twist akin to Dark vader.

LOL i think thats just her voice. I see original posters point and dont think he has to love everything on a cast to listen to it. Constructive criticism is fine just i guess be nicer about it. I do notice i hate youtube reaction videos that have the LOUD YELLING about saying WHATS UP GUYS! GET OUR MURCH AND PATREON Etc. Its hard on the ears when listening on headphones but i would never tell them that since the fans would roast me. Find a nicer way or suggest some way Abby can chime in while not talking over others (i think thats what your going for idk)

@deathpooky: yeah i was shocked how down on it they were. and when i say down i mean the usual gb eh i played OW but i bounced off it...its fine its just eh i got other games to play might come back to it. etc. The way they say that about games they gave a hour over the weekend always bumbs out someone who played it more. Its like they dont see the cool reasons you like the game. Just as perplexing when gb staff or other sites, finishes a game and you wonder if they saw the same stuff you saw ie GOD OF WAR being considered dull or not having enough cool action scenes.

I 100% agree with Alex on Die Hard 5. I saw that movie for free and still was so mad at it I almost walked out.

Rogue One is easily the best Star Wars film because it was a Star Wars film that felt the least like Star Wars.

Sounds like Outer Wilds might be a lock for GOTY. Besides Alex, they all rave about it and they've been talking about it since the beginning of summer.

I wish I liked Outer Wilds, but I don’t enjoy the feeling of moving around in the ship or on foot and I find the time mechanics fascinating in theory but tedious in practice.

Mike with the correct response about the Sonic movie

I have some specific complaints about Dark Moon, and I have no idea if they’re the same as the GB staff’s complaints. Note that I played Luigi’s Mansion 1 very very late in the GameCube lifecycle when it was cheap, and had a good time with it. I was reasonably positive about the idea of playing a 3DS Luigi’s Mansion.

I seem to recall Luigi’s Mansion 1 being blasted for being kinda short (maybe 8-12 hours unless you get really stuck). My problem with DM is that it‘s still about 10 hours of content, but stretched out to 20 hours. Instead of poking around 1 mansion for 10 hours, DM had 5. BUT, the mansion missions are broken up. You get to a new mansion, explore maybe 25% of it, find/reactivate some objective, get pulled back to E. Gadd’s lab. Go back in, explore maybe 50% of it, back to the lab. 75%, lab, 100%, lab. Then one final mission where you’ve explored the whole place and can get to the boss door, but some bullshit ghost dog steals the key like it’s a bone and the devs waste another mission’s worth of time where you have to revisit the whole mansion you’ve already seen to get your damn key back (this dog thing happens in 2-3 of the game’s 5 mansions). It just felt like they were padding the game’s length by pulling you back to the start of the mansions constantly. Every mansion was 5 missions long but felt like it should’ve been 3.

Also, DM and 3 just have a different vibe than 1. 1 had very little in the way of “rank and file” generic neon ghosts. Most of the ghosts in 1 were unique, themed after the room you found them in. The study would have an old gentleman ghost reading a book, and you couldn’t stun him until you got him to stop looking at his book. The gymnasium would have a bodybuilder ghost that wouldn’t fight you, but would if you got his attention by air blasting a punching bag into him. DM’s ghost designs are all just the same generic detail-less ghosts for basically the entire game. In DM, you go to some different locales, but the ghosts stay largely the same. They have a few different types, but none of them are unique little mini bosses, nor are they even themed to the particular mansion you’re in.

I think DM still had very good, Addams Family-esque creaky haunted house environments, the sound and music were still solid. But I feel like the enemy variety and unique gameplay content/overall length was a little on the low side compared to Luigi’s Mansion 1. I didn’t walk away from DM feeling like I wanted to recommend it to people.

What. The. Fuck. Ad Astra is blooming incredible movie. Probably top 5 movie of the year for me, the ending though was hookey!

Abbey pls

“We’re going from four shitters to two!”

Ugh, I have a cousin who always skips the intro and ending sequence of any anime we watch, and it drives me nuts. It's one thing to do it after you've seen it once, but it's another to do it by default. Like, I have to miss catchy tunes, awesome scenes, stingers, and gag segments because he's afraid of spoilers. Like, if he doesn't know the scene beforehand, it doesn't seem that bad! Seriously! >:

I was wondering when we would get comment from GB on the distinct lack of anything remotely Final Fantasy in Kingdom Hearts 3. Don't worry though Vinny and those who don't know, there is a gift shop with some figurines on display! I'm not sure you can actually buy those in game, but you can look at the tiny models!

Seriously though, I feel like I would have felt real real cheated if i Had bought Kingdom Hearts III expecting Final Fantasy fan-service and content, as someone who maybe played 1 and 2 back in the day and wanted to now play 3.

If I went in expecting at least a 50/50 split, or maybe a 30/70 split in favor of disney and I got..well 0.01%/99.99% in favor of disney Kingdom Hearts 3 actually gives us.

Also, as someone who hasn't seen a single one of the Disney owned Starwars movies or knock offs. My understanding through cultural osmosis was that Rogue One was a garbage film, and only better then Solo on account, maybe, of Solo also being a worse garbage film. I don't see how thinking Solo is better then Rogue one is a hot take though. I've seen that opinion all over the internet and I don't frequent star-wars fan sites or message boards or anything of the sort.

(whispers) Annihilation is just an okay movie and a better director could have made it great.

Final Fantasy men and Mickey Mouse end up in the same game because they all live in their own seperate worlds, but then the heartless fuck it all up and you have to travel from place to place with your gummi spaceship to restore the peace. It's a real-time action RPG where you level up, collect skill points, gain abilities and use magic with MP & do summons. The draw of KH1 is that you spend like a few hours hopping from Disney world to Disney world, and refamiliarize yourself with the broad strokes of those stories, while the heartless folk throw an extra roadblock up for you to solve in each world. Eventually this heartless anime story gets brought to the forefront with the disney princesses from these stories cast in major roles and people generally get really sucked into that aspect of the story even more than the quick disneyworld visits. After all, a game should have more story than just a a slight remix of well-known Disney movies the creators must've thought.

What's up with this Terminator movie? A guy from the future gets sent back into the past to kill Sarah Connor so John never gets born to lead the resistance, but changing the past will also change the future, which means that the future wouldn't have existed in the same way and there would be no need for the Terminator to go back in the past to kill Sarah, because the future with John leading the resistance wouldn't exist. And this guy that's born already needs to send his father back in the past to protect his mom and make sure he gets born, but he's already born? This is so complicated and weird. I don't know how you do it Dan. :)

Dan needs to learn to cut in line in crowded bathrooms

@morningcoffee: Honestly I won't be surprised if it is. It's the type of game that GiantBomb usually picks for GOTY after arguing for hours over the heavy hitters.

@azuregale: I generally use anime OP/EDs as an excuse to browse the internet for 2 minutes as a sort of break if I'm watching multiple episodes at once, if I'm not I'l'l skip the OP after I've seen it once and I'll generally skip to the end of the ED. You can't just skip the ED and the rest of the episode as some shows have post credit scenes before the preview!

When I introduced Star Trek the Next Generation to my girlfriend I told that we were going to watch the intro every single time and we did, take that Netflix.

Where can you Mario Kart 8 used for $15? I'm seeing $44 on Ebay

@vinny yeah there's no Final Fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts 3 :(

@original_hank: It's a really dang good game. Thank you for your work on it!

@hollitz: Annihilation felt like a ripoff of Solaris to me. It was alright, but I think in pretty much every respect I preferred the Solaris films (script, performances, etc.)

@undeadkink: apparently he has some sort of in perpetuity contract for first refusal rights to voicing the character, and he loves doing it so much he takes every opportunity. It sucks, but nothing they could do even if they wanted to.

I like how "trying to give your customers what they want and are asking for" is "giving in to the online mob."

I just need to say, abbey asking why mike knows about guns and implies its a bad thing, really bummed me out.

I like going to the shooting range. I intend to learn how to skin/clean a deer.

shotguns have some range but buckshot is completely unreliable.

Kingdom Hearts is totally a "power of friendship" game, but it uses its scifi bullshit to kinda create the perfect scenes where that power of friendship moment is especially heartfelt or epic.

Every game basically takes a different theory from philosophy or religion and turns it into a different scifi/fantasy allegory to do "power of friendship" in a different way, which is what makes the universe and story so complex. But at the end of the day, it's all in service of the character's caring for each other.

I think that's why some people you might not expect are way into this franchise.

The Last Jedi was the last movie that made me angry. I couldn't stop thinking about the scene where Rose tries to save Finn by doing something to him that should have killed him. It's just so unbelievably stupid.

As someone who generally disagrees with Abby's takes on movies she's right about Ad Astra. It's pretty but devoid of any interesting thought. It's like a hot idiot that speaks just because it loves the sound of its own voice.

If you want a good deep dive on Kingdom Hearts. Waypoint did a series of podcasts around when 3 came out that were really good

@sloppydetective: I was particularly perplexed by the incredibly positive reviews of Ad Astra to the point where I started to seriously question my own intelligence like maybe I just didn’t get it or something.

Abby is still 1000% wrong on Rogue One though.

The last half hour of Rogue One is good, the rest is pants.

Glad to hear Outer Wilds getting some more recognition by the GB crew and that they're digging it. It's difficult to discuss it without giving it all away. Flaws and all, it's cemented among the top games ever on my personal list and is my GOTY. I've been in a gaming funk for about a year or so, but Outer Wilds has rekindled my love for games and reminded me what is possible with the medium.

@xbob42: This is a pretty simplified version of what happened. Everyone tries to give customers what they want (or they think they are trying to). They sent artists and animators into what had to be an insane amount of crunch because people went insane on the internet over a movie and drastically changed their entire artistic concept of the movie because people were losing their minds on the internet. That is absolutely craving to a mob.

Also (not directed at you xbob42), another week, another collection of shithead takes on Abby. In addition, can we all learn to spell her name correctly? She has been at the site for going on 3 years now AND it is right there at the top of the page AND it is her username. It's kind of super rude that a person won't take 5 seconds to spell a human being's name correctly, and it happens here ALL THE TIME.

@humanity: Rogue One is fine. Force Awakens is the only new Star Wars I would give a 4 out of 5 rating; everything else is fine to bad. The idea that Solo is better than any of them is crazy. That thing is ugly and boring, and Donald Glover gets a pass on what is truly a bad performance - maybe his performance might've been tailored to the Lord and Miller version, but in the Ron Howard version it is awful.

@sloppydetective: apart from rating Rogue One higher then yah I pretty much agree with all of that. I thought Solo had fun moments but overall was not a very good movie and while I enjoyed Glover in his tv show Atlanta a great deal I agree he doesn’t really do a great job here - it’s a passable performance but that’s about it.

Last thing about Solo - out of all the ridiculous things in that movie the light-speed NOS probably takes the cake. It’s weird how they just don’t give a shit about continuity and invent crazy things in prequels that never appear in the later movies. I mean how many times are they trying to outrun someone in the Falcon where a little NOS capsule would help them get away? It looked really cool I’ll give them that but just like ripping through a Star Destroyer using light speed in Last Jedi it really breaks a lot of logic.

@humanity: Solo has one of the most terrible moments in a sequel film ever for me in how the character Han Solo gets his name. Again, it might've worked in Lord and Miller's version, but in the Howard version it is so fucking stupid I'm surprised everyone in my theater didn't die from the sudden influx of C02 caused by all of us groaning all at once. The part of the film that worked the best for me was Han and Chewie. But I'm also not some die-hard Star Wars head that needs everything to be a certain way. I just want an enjoyable flick which many of these have not been -- especially Last Jedi which I think Dan and Abby both liked.

Portland, Maine native here. Thanks for the shout-out Bakalar!

I almost never skip show intros. Even when I'm watching multiple episodes back-to-back, even if it's a show I'm rewatching, I still rarely skip. The only time I can remember skipping them routinely was back years ago when I was marathoning Naruto Shippuuden during a college summer. I was watching 10-20 episodes per day. (At that point, Shippuuden was somewhere around episode 230 or so, so I had a lot of ground to cover.) Naruto changes its opening song and animation every so often, and I like most of them. But some of them I'm not much of a fan of, and since I was watching a lot of episodes per day, I did start skipping it then. But that's it.

Not sure why Jeff was surprised about a graphic show being on FX. FX is basically HBO Lite. Sons of Anarchy was an FX show, and some of the stuff shown in there was questionable.

FOUR SHITTERS TO TWO!

@suits: I’m glad this podcast gave us Dan at peak Randy Quaid.

Kingdom Hearts isn't complicated.

Kingdom Hearts is complicated. The entire Metal Gear Solid line? Fine and understandable albeit with some long-winded, shounen flair. KH? You could probably build an entire YouTube channel dedicated to explaining the games and its timeline.

I would love for Jeff and Vinny to to a deep dive on the technical inner working of that pinball machine.