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By the time Digimon World 3 rolled around in 2002, a franchise that started as an egg-shaped virtual pet and spun off into a manga and an anime around the same time had picked up enough separate games and separate continuities that keeping any of it straight had apparently stopped being a priority. At least one reviewer we found says flat-out that the game gets its own canon wrong in places, which at this point feels less like a flaw and more like a house style.

You play a kid named Junior, no last name, no further explanation, who gets pulled into a server with three Digimon partners, though only one is allowed to actually fight at a time while the other two wait their turn. Enemies show up completely at random now too, so unlike earlier games in the series, you can’t just spot trouble on the map and calmly walk the other way. Take enough hits and your blast meter fills up, letting a Digimon go Blast Digivolve and get meaner for a while, or you can combine two Digimon with DNA Digivolve to create something new that fires off one big attack and then immediately splits back apart. There’s also a full card battle game built right into the RPG, all 314 cards of it, so between fetch quests you’ll have plenty of downtime to build a deck.

Joining us to help sort through all of it is Chels Eichholz, who co-hosts The Q Division, a James Bond rewatch podcast, and Across the Whoniverse, a Doctor Who marathon show that “kidnaps” a new companion every episode to explore a different corner of sixty-plus years of continuity. Between those two franchises, Chels has plenty of practice diving into a huge tangle of lore and coming out the other side having a genuinely great time, which makes them the perfect person to take on a game that’s basically nothing but tangled lore.

So dig up an old memory card, pick which one of your three Digimon gets to have a personality this round, and let’s find out whether Digimon World 3 earned its spot in Digimon history, or whether it should’ve DNA Digivolved into something else entirely.

Most podcast guests call in from a spare bedroom, a closet lined with winter coats, or a parked car outside a grocery store. Josh Garvey is joining us from the middle of a black hole. On the bright side, the room tone is fantastic. Nothing echoes when nothing, light included, is allowed to leave.

It’s also a fitting backdrop, because this episode is all about taking an adventure you used to play and asking it to sit still on a page. Somebody looked at a whole quest built on mashing buttons and said, “What if the only button left was ‘turn the page’?” The bravest thing you can do is lick your thumb. That’s a bold leap from the action genre to the paper-cut genre, and we’re going to take a hard look at The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in comic form.

Josh has agreed to walk us through it from beyond the event horizon, where time runs a bit slow, so by the time you hear this he’s technically still on his first sentence. That also makes him the only guest we’ve ever had who can offer a genuine link to the past, a pun I’ve been sitting on since the moment he said yes. We had to be careful with the mic placement, since anything left within Josh’s reach gets stretched into a very long strand of spaghetti. Lesson learned about the pop filter.

So please keep your arms, legs, and any nearby light inside the episode at all times, and don’t panic if the audio shows up a few billion years late. Nobody has ever returned from a black hole to leave a bad review, which honestly might be the best business model in podcasting.

Every generation needs a reminder that games-based-on-movies-based-on-comics are their own strange little ecosystem, and Hellboy: The Science of Evil is a proud, slightly confused citizen of it. It doesn’t adapt either del Toro movie directly. Instead it just borrows the general vibe, invents its own plot, and trusts you to recognize a giant stone fist and a wisecracking demon without needing either film’s actual story. It’s the video game equivalent of a cover band that only plays originals.

And that giant stone fist deserves a moment, because it’s doing some real character-design heavy lifting. Hellboy is built around exactly one absurdly oversized body part, and that’s basically the whole design manual for a certain flavor of comic book tough guy: pick one appendage, blow it up past the point of reason, let the silhouette do the talking. Todd McFarlane ran the identical play with Spawn, except he went south instead of north, handing us a hero who could probably punt a sedan but might struggle to tie his own laces. One big fist, one big boot. Same weird design instinct, opposite ends of the body.

Which is a good excuse to bring in George Marston of Spawnography, the podcast where Pierce Lydon joins in to spend their time in the giant-boot corner of that exact design philosophy. George is flying solo this round to see how a giant fist holds up against a their usual task of studying a giant boot.

So pick your favorite oversized body part, brace for a beat-em-up that seems mildly allergic to its own source material, and let’s find out whether The Science of Evil earns a place next to del Toro’s films, or whether it belongs exactly where most tie-in games end up: forgotten. And don’t forget about the Nazi occultism.