Topic: Episode 993: I Would Never Attempt To Sell a Fudgie the Whale T-Shirt on TeePublic.com Under the Nom de Plume Food Daddy James

[NWR_Lindy]

That would be immoral and wrong to use my platform to get you to look at a Fudgie the Whale T-Shirt on TeePublic.com if I were selling it.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/rfn/77360/episode-993-i-would-never-attempt-to-sell-a-fudgie-the-whale-t-shirt-on-teepubliccom-under-the-nom-de-plume-food-daddy-james

Somehow I ended our recording session with two titles that had "Fudge" in them. They are not related. This was not a callback. I did not notice it in real time.

Only after taking a break to clean up my notes did I notice this truly strange coincidence.

Greg is out this week, his Bills were inaugurating their new stadium at the expense of the Lions. However, Jon has finally found his way home, and so this week is a JJ+G instead of the previous two GG+J configurations.

I appreciate that this kind of attendance notation does not actually give you all the information you may desire, but this is a tragic reality that we all live with. I could use subscripts, and in fact I could opt to only use them where clarification is required - GG does not require a subscript since I am indicating both G's are present. JJ + G_u would actually make it clearer. I will not do this going forward.

And as we've always known - Greg and Gui are the ultimate G's.

"G" thangs aside, this show kicks off with NEW BUSINESS!

As the returning host, Jon gets first crack at the microphone with DARIUSBURST Chronicle Saviours. This devolves into an expedition into the heart of Darius. In true RFN fashion, the plot is completely lost.

James is now deep into his career as a museum curator in Two Point Museum. Understanding the game mechanics far better than when we last spoke about it, he has become somewhat obsessed with providing cultural enrichment to Two Point County.

Guillaume is still exploring the origins of Sonic in...Sonic Origins. Sonic 1 might still be his favorite, but there's more origins yet to see. He's seen the ending of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book - which remains a really charming game.

Possibly inspired by the announcement of Romancing SaGa 3: Destinies United, Guillaume is digging into Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven. The question: does a Romancing SaGa game with some of the Romancing SaGa funk sanded off remain a Romancing SaGa game? These are games that explain nothing, and pursue paths are cryptic and seemingly random.

The way these RFN articles pivot from point to point just as random, and is weirdly like an LLM; my brain is attempting to construct the next token based almost entirely on the previous one. Rarely are their callback jokes in this articles - I'm often just transitioning from one to the next. The result is a bit of a treasure map that leads only to the episode credits.

Here is one such example: our entire Listener Mail segment is about the utility of using an LLM as an agentic search tool while playing games - rather than a game wiki or a GameFAQ. It gets a bit spicy when the practical reality of such tools run headlong into a conversation on their broader ethical implications and impacts.

Emails are delivered to this box. We were asked "does this even work?" and I assure you, it does.

• (00:06:15) New Business - Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours.
• (00:20:41) Two Point Museum.
• (00:38:39) Sonic Origins. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book.
• (00:49:33) Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven.
• (01:13:09) Listener Mail - Our use of AI for gaming.

[Evan_B]

I don’t know if I’d hazard to say I can do a better job at explaining Romancing SaGa 2’s appeal, but… one thing that is very enticing about it is that you have plenty of opportunities to make choices that really do matter. One example is early on in the campaign where you help a nearby kingdom select its successive ruler, which you can influence directly or refuse (which leads to particular dialogue choices), but your decision can also then impact how the assassination plot plays out. If you decide not to bother with the entire affair, you then have to bring peace to the region by helping out the resistance forces and bringing peace to the ghosts of the successors by installing a rightful ruler once you’ve time-jumped. This is far from the only example of dialogue like this and choices echo down the timeline as you gather new retinue members.

In short, there are things that the player might want to prioritize because the game puts them directly in your path, but it’s also designed to handle the variety of approaches you might take- while having meaningful consequences for said choices. It’s not a grand, yet linear adventure in the vein of Final Fantasy, but it does feel timeless in the way it presents characters and narrative beats, never really lingering too long on specific regional conflicts in lieu of the greater threat- though there is nuance to be uncovered.

And Gui, hoping that you come across one of the “backstory tablets” that humanizes the Seven Heroes literally and figuratively.