Yeah, love the Podcast.
and I loved when Patrick and Austin called out on Shenmue for being obtuse and outdated.
People need to move, They were OK, but now they are bad games.
Yakuza games is where is at.
As much as I like the podcast overall, I had to skip past the ffxv analysis by Austin and especially Patrick when he mentioned that "I wish there was some prologue episode explaining relationships between characters"
I know that a videogame journalist doesn't have the time to consume ever piece of media out there but come on, both Kingslaive & Brotherhood solved / answered all of his gripes & he should at least be aware of their existence even if he hasn't had the time to watch both.
It's rather frustrating hearing two journalists who I like and are meant to be knowledgeable on the subject of videogames be completely oblivious to the companion media that answers and addresses most if not all of your gripes about a game.
I really don't want to call you out, but you seem to be cherry picking their comment. They exactly expressed the fact that, once you need other mediums to explain the motivation of your entire character of the game, you fucked up. I don't wanna watch a movie or series to actually understand a game that I paid my hard earned money and made me more confused and puzzled on why things turned out as they did.
The fact that you are encouraging people to watch/read/ listen to other mediums to justify a shortcoming to a game is bizarre. I mean, if the base game had a complete story; meaning that all the characters are properly laid out, the plot progressed smoothly, etc; and The movies just expanded on the fiction, then thats fine. But if I need to that, and the game didn't exactly fulfilled its presupposed promises of being a complete tale, then the have screwed up entirely.
In fact, Square Enix seems to agree with me considering they are patching the Kingsleive storyline into the actual game to give more context to the storyline.