Fans are concerned Critical Role's Suikoden one-shot will be ruined by one player's "complete incompetence and blaming the game"

Yahoo

06-03-2025

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Critical Role is soon to air a Suikoden one-shot campaign – a notoriously underrated JRPG setting, according to many forums, but one that lives rent-free in the hearts of millions. With Matt Mercer as the Game Master, Ashley Johnson, Taliesin Jaffe will be playing along with Zeno Robinson (of Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman and My Hero Academia fame), D&D content creator Zachary Renauldo, and Arin Hanson of Game Grumps. The latter of whom's appearance has been stirring up some doubts on the Critical Role subreddit.
Using one of the best tabletop RPG systems around as usual, D&D 5e, this will be an interesting mishmash of old-school JRPG mechanics with the well-known Dungeons & Dragons system. The party will be working through a short story set in the republic of Dunan – a prominent location in the Suikoden 2 video game – and have hinted that the campaign will begin in the cozy White Deer Inn just outside of Muse City. There the players will be in store for a nice warm meal, and a whole load of shenanigans I imagine.
That's what fans are expecting from Game Grumps' Arin Hanson, at least, with commenters on a r/Criticalrole thread trumpeting Hansons role along with the announcement latching onto Hansons prior antics. There are heaps of upvotes on comments that doubt Hansons ability to stay on track.
"The problem is when Arin fails at an extremely basic task (almost always because he didn't read), and then blames the game" puts user Kyleometers rather bluntly. "He can't play any long game he hasn't already played as a kid without a guide, because he's completely incapable of reading instructions and coming to simple conclusions on mechanics."
The post goes on "It's PAINFUL watching Arin fail to do something the tutorial showed him how to do, and then yell about how the game sucks because it's not intuitive."
Another commenter notes that "It was funny at first but as time went on Arin showed how little he actually knows about game design and watching his game play it became more and more apparent." That's according to Doctor-Piranha, who's looking at 63 upvotes echoing the sentiment. They continue "My breaking point was the ocarina of time playthrough. It was infuriating to watch".
In Hanson's defense, one commenter believes "Arin has been making an… attempt to be less dismissive of tutorials lately", though the lack of upvotes here suggests the consensus is leaning the other way.
You can expect to find the party knee-deep in some Scarlet Moon Empire political struggles on March 11 at 7pm PST / 10pm EST over on the Critical Role podcast. For those in the UK it'll be aired at 2am the next day (March 12), if you're willing to stay up that late on a Tuesday.
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