So here’s something a bit different.
Three quick things about me:
- I have a slightly unsettling number of YouTube watch hours banked on analytical video essays, particularly of the movie and (most relevantly here) gaming variety;
- I am a huge believer in the power of properly-managed expectations when it comes to the personal enjoyment I find in entertainment media (which, after all, is meant to entertain);
- My enjoyment of videogames is often directly tied to my ability to discuss them with others before, during and after I play them (this one shouldn’t shock anyone). To put it plainly, when I enjoy discussing games with people – whether online or in person – I enjoy those games more.
These points have naturally come together over the course of the last several years to ensure I’ve responded strongly to the following ten analytical YouTube videos. These aren’t the only ten that have ever struck me – not even close – but I felt like shouting out these in particular because each one has either given me a perspective-altering revelation that helped me look at the videogames I play and discuss in a more balanced way, and/or laid out in clear terms something I’d already felt about said games but was unable to properly articulate. These ten may total around three and a half hours watched back-to-back, but they also happen to be on the shorter side of my Favourites playlist, believe it or not, so as much as I really want to put a Kotaku-era Tim Rogers video here, I’ll resist.
Yes, that makes what you’re about to read the equivalent of ten separate way-too-long YouTube comments, but I mainly want to highlight the videos themselves. They may definitely skew towards topics that happen to interest me specifically, but have a watch of a few if you want, maybe listen to them while doing something monotonous, and hopefully you’ll find a view or two worthwhile. You might even pick up a new subscription.
Subjectivity Is Implied
Joseph Anderson, 2018
Main Takeaway: “Objective opinions” don’t exist, and entirely objective analyses are boring.
We start with the most reactionary video of the lot – it’s clear Mr Anderson recorded this rant as a frustrated response to wider media literacy trends – but it has to go first because the point at its centre informs (or should inform) every other analytical video, ever.
Despite its title, the video tackles two sides of the same fallacious coin: the silly idea that publicised takes on videogames should be clarified as subjective opinions repeatedly to eliminate all possible option for devious deception, and the even sillier idea that every videogame take must endeavour to be an “objective opinion”, which as Joe describes, is like “asking for the conversational equivalent of hot frozen ice cream”.
That second part in particular has long been a frustration of mine to explain to people, and this Anderson essay is a fascinating breakdown of the issue that ends up with a remarkably charitable attitude to the potential reasons why people might think they want such an oxymoron, despite the author’s gritted-teeth presentational tone. It’s the video that inspired the idea for this list many years ago, and it’s well worth a watch.
Breath of the Wild’s “Disneyland Problem”
Mother’s Basement, 2017
Main Takeaway: Your job – and exposure to videogames – significantly affects your preferences.
This one has rapidly turned into a bit of an odd time capsule – Geoff Thew doesn’t even do videogame content anymore, having long since made his real YouTube fortune through the popular niche of anime openings, and so none of the hypothetical Breath of the Wild videos he mentions in the beginning actually came to pass. Yet despite this, the video he did make is the most compelling illustration of reviewer-to-fandom dissonance I have ever seen, and it achieves this almost as an accident on the way to mounting a wide-angle defense of one specific game against perceived criticism a mere month into its long life.
By the sheer nostalgic charm of a fired-up attitude in a lo-fi-by-current-standards setup, confident enough to oppose “let’s call them idiots” via hastily-assembled bullet points but relatably self-conscious in his repeated links to other video essays, Thew casts light on the high-pressure environmental context that causes many professional videogame reviewers to value polish, novelty, relative brevity and accessible flow-state over other desirable qualities in games. And he’s bang-on the money.
Not only has this distinction helped me filter what I read or watch the weekend of a new game’s launch while preparing for the often-inevitable counter-opinions to come, it’s also helped me work out why I tend to value the same elements highly as well. After all, I may not be paid to write about games, but after decades surrounding myself with constant new releases and reactions to those new releases, my preferences occasionally shake out shockingly similar. As stupid as it may sound, realising all this has helped me relax and enjoy the discourse a lot more.
While the rest of the video isn’t as interested in directly backing up the well-made press point, and I disagree with a couple of Thew’s BotW defenses (I would’ve loved to see that “best story in a Zelda game” claim expanded on), he does go on to make a second argument dissolving impossible expectations around supposedly “infinite” games with a pretty elegant Disneyland allegory that’s also worth watching – and may or may not foreshadow another video further down this list.
Genwunner | The Problem with Pokemon’s Artstyle
Purple Gaming, 2019
Main Takeaway: Years of widely accepted majority opinions on game franchises can completely miss the point.
Refining this list down to ten entries required some self-imposed rules, and one of them dictated that I probably shouldn’t bring in too many videos focused on just one game or series, unless that singular focus brought out or supported a conclusion with much wider-reaching implications. That rule eliminated literally hundreds of my favourite videos, but I just had to keep this one.
Even though the content of the video essentially boils down to one narrator riffing off a viral reddit post, that post and Purple Gaming’s exploration of its implications absolutely blew my mind the first time I watched. The very concept that the battle lines of an all-time knuckle-dragging fandom fight have been drawn in the wrong place for decades short-circuited something inside of me, and then honestly made me excited to see what other mainstream accepted gaming opinions might be open to some prodding.
For what it’s worth, the second half of Purple Gaming’s video attempts to fold the major art style debate into some of the usual criticisms against the modern Pokemon games’ stubborn resistance to change, but those issues are perhaps handled better in other videos out there. Still, this is a fun watch.
You Don’t Need to Finish Games
GC Vazquez, 2021
Main Takeaway: Don’t fear your backlog; games are meant to be enjoyed.
First and foremost, this video by GC Vazquez features one of the most impactful and well-constructed introductions I have ever watched. Cleverly weaving familiar real-world experiences together in one anxiously poetic pattern, the intro makes half the piece’s argument before the meat of the topic even presents itself. It’s four minutes of near-perfect verbal presentation and worth your time all on its own.
But yes, there is a larger point to be made, and it’s controversial to say the least. When you take a step back from your own unexplored hang-ups on game completion, as I’d say this video helps to achieve, it becomes evident that an awful lot of us are weirdly precious about the topic. The video goes into things like work-life balance, sunk cost fallacy and peer pressure, but, as may become a bit of a noticeable pattern if you choose to dive into more of Vazquez’s work, the largest slice of blame is reserved for mainstream videogame marketing.
Ultimately, a title as directly confrontational as this one is going to get a bunch of us unnecessarily emotional, as it did for me when I first saw it. But the main thrust of the essay is less about some unspoken sanctity of a “complete” videogame experience and more about being mindful about the silent yet astonishingly massive effect a “backlog” can have on our mental wellbeing and, therefore, how much we’re able to enjoy the very games we stress about finishing. It’s a doozy of a topic with a laundry list of asterisks (the spectre of heavily story-driven games, for one), but this eloquent video has certainly helped shift my perspective on gaming priorities – even if I might need to come back to it once in a while for a reminder.
Western & Japanese RPGs – Parts I-III
Extra Credits, 2012
Main Takeaway: Genres and subgenres hold the most value to a player when the REASONS you want to play a game are considered. Also, categorisation is hard.
Yes, this is technically three separate videos, but they come from a bygone YouTube era that supposedly rewarded slicing a longer-form video into smaller parts; when put together the whole production isn’t even close to the longest video on this page, so here they are in all their completed glory.
This Extra Credits (a channel that flies under the Extra History banner nowadays) video series marked possibly the first time in my life when I experienced a moment of unexpected clarity from a YouTube visit, as for most of my adult life I have struggled to pinpoint why I find so-called “JRPGs” so appealing and yet bounce off “Western RPGs” almost invariably whenever I try one. I’ve also consistently found the boundaries of those categorical definitions troubling, having played games with JRPG qualities made by non-Japanese studios and vice versa.
The series posits above all that genre classification should be defined by the type of experience a player wants to receive from their play sessions, rather than more surface-level qualifiers like art style or country of origin. This concept quickly became a tangible – if imperfect – lightning rod for my RPG expectations that has served me well for a decade when choosing my games. Yet it must be said that some of the specifics within the messaging, and the depressing main theme of the third chapter in particular, appear a bit dated nowadays. Which, funnily enough, brings me to:
RPGs Were Never About Roleplaying
Adam Millard – The Architect of Games, 2023
Main Takeaway: A more detailed and updated refinement of the RPG delineation points within the previous entry.
There are only so many slots on this list and so many potential topics to cover, so why feature another video all about RPG categorisation? Well, because it’s just that good, for one: in eleven years of watching YouTube I hadn’t found a worthwhile successor to the Extra Credits production, but this Adam Millard kid just nails his arguments with a clever structure that flows out from an upfront metaphor featuring Darwin’s famous Galapagos finches; it’s engaging the whole way through.
The second and more pressing reason is because it’s made within a definitive 2023 context. In an amusing twist of fate, those EC videos were produced right at the end of arguably the darkest and most wayward age for JRPGs, just as Xenoblade Chronicles was hitting American shores for the first time and about a year before the likes of Ni No Kuni, Bravely Default and Fire Emblem Awakening would bring strong storytelling and inventive mechanics back to the subgenre in a big way. Of course megatons like Final Fantasy XIV, Persona 5 and Dragon Quest XI would fan the flames of this rebirth in the years since to return an element of prestige to the JRPG name, but I’d argue the most significant change has come from the indie space, where smaller western developers have given us everything from Undertale to Battlechasers Nightwar to Chained Echoes – great JRPGs in all but geography.
So you might say a new breakdown for a new age (and new audience) is needed – and what a breakdown this is. In one fell swoop Millard explains how one player might crave a Disco Elysium while another pines for Diablo IV – both western-developed games – what motivates the intense opinions around whether Fallout 3 or New Vegas is better, and why the divisive Final Fantasy XVI still feels like a JRPG despite its lack of true role-playing systems. Without necessarily addressing all of the points Extra Credits covered so well, Millard fleshes out a wonderfully rich picture of the diverse joys the modern RPG landscape can offer different kinds of players, then brings them all together under one astute common banner. Don’t even get me started on the moment he brings out that four-way sorting graph – oh my stars and garters.
Rockstar’s Game Design is Outdated
NakeyJakey, 2018
Main Takeaway: Not all open-world games are created equal; it’s hard to tell a cinematic story while incentivising spatial exploration; expectations REALLY MATTER
This one’s a real multi-level doozy.
Probably the most famous video on this list, and definitely the longest, NakeyJakey’s viral first dance with passionate longer-form criticism is still the one I relate to the most (I did not get along with Red Dead Redemption 2 myself, but Jake’s similarly-formatted Naughty Dog video a couple of years later, which makes some properly compelling points, is still built from natural gaming preferences we do not share). Despite its 40-minute length, the manic-yet-systematic takedown is also probably the video I enjoyed rewatching the most while writing this; Jake’s a natural performer and it helps his arguments to no end.
Like the Mother’s Basement video on Breath of the Wild, this one is ostensibly focused on one game. But, also just like that video, the engaging way it unfolds makes a much wider point: in an open-world game, it’s quite a tricky proposition to have your cinematic storytelling cake and eat it too – or, as Jake’s own repeated metaphor so cleanly describes it, to give someone the freedom of a giant LEGO bucket and then also ask them to follow direct instructions in the pursuit of building a beautiful curated set.
The tone of Jake’s case is more accusatory than that, motivated by a personal frustration that seems to imply he believes the cinematic grandeur of RDR2‘s widely-praised narrative is worth considerably shaving down, or maybe even sacrificing, in the name of more immersive moment-to-moment exploration and gameplay. But the realisation I initially had watching was more birds-eye: for all their well-documented oversaturation these days, big-budget open-world games can actually be quite different from one another, placing emphasis on certain elements over others for better or worse and tailoring any number of moods or goals as a result.
That may seem like a dead-obvious observation in 2023, but five years ago when the video dropped I was so tired of the well-worn triple-A open-world gameplay formula and marketing cycle that I had begun to give up on new entries in the genre as soon as they were announced. Seeing Jake do such an exhaustive job of breaking down the dissonance between linear story and non-linear side content may have helped me pinpoint what I didn’t enjoy about Red Dead 2, but in a weird way actually softened my opinion on the game.
This is because Red Dead Redemption 2 is so stubbornly self-conscious about protecting the narrative experience of which the developers are so justifiably proud that the game kind of pushes itself away from the homogeneous triple-A pack and becomes its own distinct love-it-or-hate-it thing within the open-world space. Rockstar prioritises ludicrous visual fidelity and a tear-jerking character-first plotline over player agency in much the same way as Ghost of Tsushima would later come along to emphasise dreamlike combat flow and non-intrusive waypoints over levity, A Short Hike verticality and whimsy over length, or Elden Ring an insistence on hiding powerful moments of discovery over any sort of bespoke guiding hand. In a roundabout way, NakeyJakey kind of helped me get back into open-world games.
It’s illuminating to witness Jake’s direct comparison of RDR2 to Fallout: New Vegas using incidental similarities right after watching the previous two RPG essays, because through the categorisation-first lenses provided by Extra Credits and Adam Millard, it’s arguable Jake probably should never have expected anything like an Obsidian RPG from a “prestige” developer like Rockstar. Hindsight is definitely 20/20 here, but expectations definitely matter to your enjoyment of a game.
“Bad Graphics”
Jacob Gellar, 2020
Main Takeaway: It’s entirely possible to appreciate technically impressive visuals and also praise more creative low-budget artistry without feeling like a hypocrite.
Claiming that a Jacob Gellar video is great for making a single point is often a fool’s errand: the guy will almost always hit you with a substantial, surprisingly focused detour without so much as a hint of foreshadowing that is just as likely to clarify his main thesis as muddy the waters. His catalogue is extremely engaging, but less for his concise coherence than for his impeccable artistic transitions and ability to link passionate personal storytelling to real-world concerns to existentialism and back again without ever sounding preachy – in fact often coming across as downright comforting. But this particular video still does something tangible for me.
Gellar bemoans the state of the most expensive videogames of the modern era driving up each other’s visual fidelity by chasing a realistic style that can only look so unique, potentially starving the many much more interesting lower-budget visions out there of marketing oxygen, both official and word-of-mouth. He takes the chance at a typical hard-left turn straight into a laser-focused look at a particularly off-beat indie voice. But he repeatedly comes back to his own fascination with pricey, boundary-pushing triple-A graphics, in that warm and reassuring way of his. And amidst an online environment that often magnifies voices championing one side of the graphics debate over another, that’s just so refreshing to hear.
Should We Stop Comparing Games To Each Other?
Razbuten, 2022
Main Takeaway: We probably should, but as human beings we can’t ever fully do that; we can only try to be more conscious of our influences.
Oh boy. Razbuten is a YouTube creator who really delivers the thought-provoking gaming goods again and again; I could’ve spotlighted quite a few of his recent videos in particular, but of that crop this one probably supports and enriches the other videos on this page the most in the process of saying its own important things.
Comparison, I’ve found over my life, is a necessary evil of sorts. I have lost count of the amount of times I’ve tried to explain why a game is worth playing to someone in a five-minute word explosion, only for that person to claim “Oh, so it’s like Game X”, and I just want to throw my hands into the air in exasperation as I instantly assume they have missed the point. Conversely, I have often found myself scrambling for a point of comparison when I’m taking in someone else’s opinions on a game, just so I can find that tiny spark of emotive relatability that might motivate me to give it a shot.
This video does a fabulous job of showing me that both of these familiar scenarios are limited by my own intensely personal perspective. Thanks to a cognitive phenomenon called heuristics, the essential quality that is left when I boil down the hypothetical “Game X” in my mind could be completely different from the quality someone else attributes to the same game. Razbuten also dives into the role played by the order and proximity in which we play games, as well as the offline and online fan communities in which we interact, and also folds these concepts into an exploration of modern genre limitations in a way that accidentally touches on ideas the videos above also tackle. This happens to put a rather neat bow on everything for me as well.
Replay Value is Nonsense
GC Vazquez, 2023
Main Takeaway: As a marketing term – and therefore a term used in gaming discussion – “replay value” doesn’t actually mean anything, and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
We finish this by-no-means-exhaustive set of insightful gaming videos with a second GC Vazquez entry that manages to hit both of my list qualifiers: it puts into words a feeling I’ve always had in the back of my mind, then squeezes and twists that feeling in another direction to show me an entirely refreshing new angle I can apply to gaming as a whole. And just like in his other video further up this page, Vazquez cooks up the revelation on a bed of flames gently roasting the videogame marketing industry.
I’ll admit when this video – the most recent of the lot – dropped in my inbox I clicked it real quick, hoping to feast my ears on an eloquent dissection of my own long-held inner belief in the irrelevance of so-called “replayability” when it comes to determining a videogame’s quality (I’ve pretty much always believed that if a game is good to play once – assuming it actually tells its full story in one playthrough – then it’s just good, full-stop). What I got, however, was something so much more comprehensively contemplated that I felt like a fool for ever giving the replay value tag the time of day.
Though it originated from noble origins, hoping to help cash-strapped consumers maximise their gaming spending, the importance of “replay value” has been drilled deeper into our subconsciousness by clever marketing over the decades since games were short and difficult and print media reviews reserved a whole star for the R-word. It now dominates the mainstream assumptions about perceived quality, for better or worse.
But whether you think you’re on the “better” or “worse” end of the debate, it turns out you may be missing the point. Ultimately, how replayable a game is comes directly from how much you enjoy it. Like a movie, or a comfort-food sitcom, or a song or album. It’s pretty much that simple. “Replayability” does exist as a keystone of game design, but when used in marketing or everyday discussion to argue a game’s worth, it’s just utterly useless. That’s a chunky thought to chew through indeed, and Vazquez explains it better than I can here (especially in the gloriously manic last five minutes of the video), but it certainly blew my mind on first watch – which is kind of embarrassing for me to admit.
You might feel the same way I did after watching the video, you might flat-out disagree, or you might be blinking in disbelief right now that something so obvious could have missed so many people. I don’t know, but I guess that’s one of the reasons I love game discussion so much. Happy viewing.
Vagrant Rant 