Rated M For Money / Video Games

• During the 8-bit era, the British software house CRL released a number of horror Text Adventure games for different platforms which seemed specifically written as excuses to put in lots of still gore images that would get restrictively rated, for publicity. Their Jack the Ripper game actually managed to get an "18" rating.
• Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto's publishing stable, mostly publishes this class of games, with titles ranging from the relatively-tame Bully (which still attracted controversy, due to the Media Watchdogs not doing the research) to the not-at-all-tame Manhunt getting Media Watchdog and Moral Guardians alike all riled up:
  • Grand Theft Auto has been at the center of the controversy, especially after the discovery of the "Hot Coffee" data in San Andreas, which, if unlocked by a modification, allows one to see two characters having sex. This data was Dummied Out, however, requiring a cheat device or a software patch that the games maker did not release to be seen in gameplay. Copies that had said data in them were bumped up to the rarely seen "AO" rating. Ironically, later games Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto V contain graphic sex scenes (including full frontal male and female nudity) and sexual language, yet were released with M as, by the time they came out, sexual content in games had become more commonplace; the "Hot Coffee" mini-game in San Andreas is tame by comparison.
  • The original GTA was advertised in UK gaming magazines using its 18 certificate, a rarity at the time, as a unique selling point. Now that 18-rated games are as common as 18-rated films and the BBFC theoretically uses the same guidelines to rate the two media, a game being rated 18 draws little or no comment.
  • State of Emergency, a Rockstar-published (but not developed) title, is a game that attempts to simulate what it's like to be caught in the middle of a riot, started off with the premise of trying to strategically incite a riot among a disgruntled crowd but eventually shifted to an action game (that takes place in an ongoing riot) with lots of gore, partly due to this trope and, ironically, partly due to placating Moral Guardians who might find the original idea repellent (the side effect of this is a half-assed, Fridge Logic-heavy plot that has you heroically protesting an evil MegaCorp by destroying property and murdering panicked citizens).
• id Software's Doom possibly entertains the dubious title of Most Scapegoated Game in the History of All Time. Until the advent of Grand Theft Auto, Duke Nukem, Quake, and other more "realistic" games, it was constantly blamed as the drive behind all manner of anti-social and violent behavior. Notably, it was directly implicated as one of the major contributing factors behind the Columbine High School massacre. This was in part because the Doom level editor was extremely simple to use, allowing news anchors to suggest with a straight face that Doom players — including Eric Harris, one of the Columbine gunmen — were making levels of their schools, homes, local gathering spots, etc. to practice for possible massacres.^note Harris's levels, by the way, were not virtual versions of his high school to shoot up, but that didn't stop "journalists" from claiming that they were. The morbidly curious can still find them online to see for themselves. Its title is also ominous and scary, so that even after most gamers had moved on, talking heads on the news were still warning parents of the dangers of "games like Doom".
• Midway's Mortal Kombat, especially in its original arcade form, was infamous for being the first worthwhile fighting game to prominently feature blood (and lots of it) in addition to all manner of death, dismemberment, and general gruesomeness. Parent's groups complained, puritan advocates wagged fingers disapprovingly, many angry letters were written to various editors, and the game was banned from many arcades and shopping malls and was at length significantly altered (blood changed to "sweat", fatality moves removed or altered) in its first home releases for various consoles — notably, the Super Nintendo version, which flopped due to Nintendo's censorship.
  • In the Sega Genesis and Game Gear versions, however, there are codes to reactivate the blood effects. In fact, the Genesis version is what prompted Nintendo to help create the ESRB in the first place. That, and their rather transparent plan to kill off Sega by making their products unreleasable a la EC Comics when the Comics Code Authority was instituted. Thank goodness it backfired in Nintendo's face, because more people bought the Genesis version than the Super Nintendo version, which led to Nintendo allowing Mortal Kombat 2 to be ported unaltered.
  • Using live action footage for fighting also ratcheted up its gruesomeness level. Prior to Mortal Kombat, most games that even featured live action footage confined it to cut scenes or a sort of playable movie format. Mortal Kombat was one of the first games where a sprite directly under the player's control was retouched Chroma Key footage played by a real actor rather than animated.
• Super Smash Bros. features Nintendo characters engaging in cartoon-like fights. Yet Melee and Brawl both received the T for Teen rating. Brawl is a little more surprising given that it was created after the E10+ rating was created specifically for games that may push the boundaries of the E rating (though the fourth and fifth games were rated E10+).
• There was no good reason to rate God Hand higher than T for teen, considering what is gotten away with in PG-13 movies and Cartoon Network's [adult swim]. Paradoxically, one of the game's opening screens warns against the game's high content of violence and gore (a la Resident Evil), the former of which is overdone and cartoonish, and the latter of which is completely nonexistent. The main reason for this is because of a specific God Reel change. In Japan, one God Reel move has a steel washtub fall on Gene's head (a staple of manzai comedy). As Capcom felt this wouldn't make sense to American audiences, they replaced the move with "Head Slicer", a (bloodless) "Off with His Head!" attack. The ESRB reacted accordingly.
  • In Japan, the game received a B-rating (12+), which is the equivalent of the T-rating back in North America. The Devil May Cry series is rated C (15+) in Japan^note With the exception of Devil May Cry 5, which is rated D (17+), where the equivalent would be between T and M rating, and had a similar warning of gory violence, despite being tame compared to many other M-rated games from the United States. Since God Hand, Resident Evil, and Devil May Cry were all developed by Capcom, the Content Warning may be a leftover from the Japanese release, where there is less tolerance for extreme levels of violence towards humans. ^note The reason why Resident Evil gets away with so much gore is due to What Measure Is a Non-Human? (the targets are either zombies or other inhuman creatures).
• The Halo franchise, barring some occasional swearing, is a little too tame for an M rating. There's very little gore, and most of its violence is actually pretty cartoon-like - though the first games had the horrifying "space zombies" known as the Flood, which made the ESRB give the M-rating for the original based on just one image; in fact, Halo 5: Guardians and Halo Infinite both ended up getting T ratings.
  • Ironically, when Halo was adapted as a television show, the series took a hard TV-MA rating with violence, nudity, and sex scenes. The strange dissonance of the video games becoming T-rated and more "family-friendly", while the TV show went the complete opposite route, was a source of many They Changed It, Now It Sucks! complaints, with fans complaining about the watering-down of the games and the overt mature rating of the show simultaneously.
• The Witcher game series has gotten a reputation for this, thanks to its mature, recurring sexual themes, but most, if not all, of the blame for those can be laid on the source material.
• MadWorld got some attention, too, being a game completely based on various ways to kill people and having amazing amounts of blood. Most of the violence was in good humor (Shove fizzy soda down a guy's throat, throw them, soda explodes, launch them onto spiked-targets covering the naughty-bits of women). Regardless, there was much consternation in the media about how Wii was no longer a family friendly console, despite the fact that No More Heroes had been released long before Mad World, and Red Steel and Manhunt 2 were launch titles.
• God of War: Everything bleeds. A lot. There's also nudity, which is mostly irrelevant and mostly seems like a ploy to boost the rating. However, give Greek mythology a read sometime and you might be surprised at how accurate (or even tamer) God of War can be. The sexual content was heavily toned down in God of War (2018), with this trope being cited as both the reason it had been there and the reason the developers had come to find it gratuitous, though the game still earned an M rating for its comparable, though generally tamer, violence to the other games.
• Exidy's 1976 Arcade Game Death Race was one of the first games to rouse the ire of Moral Guardians, due to its gameplay that has you driving a car and running down pedestrians for points. And did we mention this was in the '70s, and the pedestrians were represented as blocky, monochrome stick figures with no blood whatsoever? Amazing how standards change...
• "Lust, violence, betrayal. Dragon Age: rated M for mature." That was the entirety of an ad on this site for Dragon Age: Origins. You'd think they'd at least say what genre the game is. They also call this a "Dark fantasy epic". While it actually is dark in that it's Darker and Edgier than some other games (in that not everyone gets a happy ending), dark also seems to mean sexual themes (including some rather... deviant ones at that), several characters spewing innuendos, blood spattering everywhere, and sometimes strict laws forbidding primary colors in Ferelden. One could easily have given the game a "T" rating if they even made everyone not become an utter blood magnet. One of the ads actually used the Marilyn Manson song "This is the New Shit" ("sex, sex, sex, and don't forget the violence") while displaying all the bloodiest scenes, implying this is what the game is about.^* Ironically, the song is about how it's no longer possible to be genuinely shocking and offensive, and everyone who thinks they're being edgy these days is really just following a paint-by-numbers checklist of "controversial" content ("stick your stupid slogan in"). Somebody at EA's marketing team didn't get the memo.
• An article promoting The Lord of the Rings: War in the North in PlayStation Magazine had the fact that the developers were aiming for an M rating plastered all over the article like it was all that mattered.
• Despite the fact that it did create a rather nice atmosphere, American McGee's Alice has some of this trope. Alice goes insane from a tragedy, and "insane" in this case means "Incredible cynicism, nightmarishly scary, gore, skeletal cats, and Darker and Edgier" - Again, it is quite atmospheric, and genuinely dark in many ways, but some of the ads seemed to emphasize that this is not the Lighter and Softer version of Alice we had grown up with, more than what kind of game this was.
• Averted with Sands of Destruction, where in Japan there isn't a stigma around their "E"-equivalent games as being "Just for kids and kids only!". The original script of the game actually had the Beastmen eat humans instead of lording over them, and was much "darker". So what's the aversion? The writers actually toned down some parts specifically to avoid an "M"-equivalent rating, that way it would be available to a wider audience. They didn't tone it down entirely, it's still rated "T", which is the "PG-13" equivalent for video games.
• Downplayed with Shadow Hearts... at least the first game, which was a bit more serious than the second and third games. Sort of being like Koudelka still, the game did have a rather dark atmosphere, but it did seem a little like the introduction was "Let's go for an 'M' rating!", as there's nothing like Yuri reattaching severed arms or Roger Bacon reaching through people's chests beyond that scene. The rest of the game could still get away with an 'M' rating, though, as there are plenty of innuendos.
• The Prince of Persia franchise made a triumphant comeback in 2003 with The Sands of Time, which introduced a witty but naive new Prince that players loved. The game had a few disturbing bits but was mostly child-friendly. Then came the sequel, Warrior Within, which ramped up the rating to M — by adding gushers of blood, foul language, sadomasochistic enemies, and a Prince embittered and hardened by running for his life for seven years. One of the most blatant cases of this trope on record. (Series creator Jordan Mechner, who had a hand in Sands of Time, has been vocal about his disapproval of Ubisoft's sequels.)
  • Strangely, The Two Thrones was also rated M, even though it was more on the level of Sands of Time. Rumor was that it was based on content that was changed before release, which seems to be the case as the Wii/PSP port, Rival Swords, is rated T despite being almost the exact same game, which makes it rather odd that the PS3-exclusive HD remaster retained its M rating.
• Averted with Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Hideo Kojima actually toned the game down to achieve a T rating, so the game would be more accessible to younger gamers. He was particularly upset about losing a scene of Electric Torture which the Japanese rating board refused to allow on their equivalent of a T. It received a T in the US with the torture scene; however, the game still received a 15 in the UK and a PEGI 18 rating in the rest of Europe.
• Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is a strange invocation of this trope, however. Due to the sequence in which the player listens to a person being raped, the game, by all accounts, SHOULD'VE gotten an "AO" rating by the ESRB.
• Soldier of Fortune. What's wrong with a game where you can blow people's limbs off and splatter their guts and brains?
• Tomb Raider:
  • The 2013 Tomb Raider game is the first in the series to be rated "M", shifting the focus to a Resident Evil-type survival-horror, as opposed to the puzzle-based platforming action-adventure formula which was a big part of the earlier Tomb Raider games' success. The 2013 game, however, does feature graphic and gruesome death sequences (for Lara!), and a greater emphasis on killing human enemies than (most of) the older games, providing additional justification of the M rating.
  • There were some complaints that certain deaths in the Crystal Dynamics-created trilogy (Legends, Anniversary and Underworld) are sanitized compared to their earlier equivalents; according to the Anniversary developer commentary, this is because of changing standards in the ratings board compared to when the original games were made. The higher rating for the 2013 game resulted in a degree of fans being pleased.
• Many of Atlus's titles are M rated, but surprisingly very mature in topic matter. Even the sex-laden Catherine is quite serious in its themes about infidelity, crossroads of life, and sexuality. They score very well with critics to this day.
  • This aspect is only true in the United States. Quite a few of Atlus's games received a lower age rating in other countries, such as the Persona 3 games getting a 12+ rating and Nocturne getting a 7+ rating. Both of these games are rated M in the United States, most likely for the rather dark themes throughout the games ("These games do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Atlus USA employees" is even shown around the opening screen or upon beginning a new game). Some of their games deserve the M rating, but for some it doesn't make much sense. Atlus states that the M rating is also because of religious themes. Understandable as religion is a very volatile subject in America. Contrary to popular belief, the recurring demon Mara is not why some of their games receive the M rating.
    • Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth and its sequel both received M ratings, making them the only non-mainline Persona games to do so until Strikers. This is despite having a chibi art style and being far tamer than any other game in the franchise. It's especially egregious considering that the rhythm games have extremely sexualized outfits for the female characters, while the Arena titles are more violent in nature due to being fighting games, all with an art style similar to the main games to boot, yet all are rated T. The fact that they are two of only around 20 or so M-rated games on the Nintendo 3DS doesn't help.
    • Persona 5 Strikers has very little reason to have an M rating. The mature subjects of the main game are heavily downplayed, no characters die on screen, the combat consists of Bloodless Carnage, and the tone is far lighter than the title it spawned from. Aside from some sexual references and swearing (including one Precision F-Strike), it would've undoubtedly received a T rating. The fact that it received a B rating in Japan, equal to T or E10+, doesn't help its case.
• Shadow the Hedgehog probably would've gotten an E rating (or at least a lower-end E10+) were it not for the half-dozen mild swears punctuating every other remark throughout the script and insertion of realistic-looking guns (there's still only Alien Blood, however, and you can't kill any of the human enemies, only incapacitate them), apparently just to secure a higher rating. Ironically, the game was originally aiming for a T rating, but when the ESRB decided to implement E10+, the game was toned down to meet that rating. To this day, however, there are still quite a few people who are surprised that it didn't get a T rating.
• Rabbids Go Home: Originally rated a PEGI 7 rating, within a few weeks, copies of the game wore a PEGI 12 rating. Most likely for the same reason Shadow the Hedgehog was bumped up to a 12: casual cursing.
• Saints Row, especially the third game: You know you have a hell of a game when a giant dildo as a weapon is one of the tamer things about it.
• Saints Row IV used "The Game That Australia Didn't Want You to Play" in some of its advertising, referring to it being refused classification in Australia.
• During standard gameplay, Vanquish is not very violent at all. A couple of Red Shirts take a bullet through the campaign but otherwise, your prime targets are all Mecha-Mooks. The game is rated 'M', however, because of a fair amount of swearing and some gruesome deaths for humans during the cinematics (particularly in the opening).
• Tales of Phantasia is more or less "T" rated at worst; however, the Fan Translation group DeJap thought it would have been more interesting if they had made it a bit more "M" rated, so they peppered the translation with unnecessary sex jokes and swears. People actually cried that the Game Boy Advance version was bowdlerized, when there weren't any sex jokes or swears to bowdlerize in the first place. Some of the sex jokes (most infamously the scene where Arche has a sex dream about Cress) existed in the original. The Fan Translation just made them a hell of a lot less subtle.
• There were a slew of terrible Atari 2600 games which featured outright sex acts with completely nude characters. Presumably the selling point was juvenile humor and licentiousness. The most infamous and offensive of these, Custer's Revenge, showed General George Custer walking up to a Native American woman and raping her while under arrow fire. Points are awarded for doing the deed. It caused a storm of outrage when it was released.
• The Interactive Movie boom of the early 1990s produced the "mature" and overtly voyeuristic games Night Trap (which bore the pre-ESRB MA-17 rating) and Voyeur (which opened with a content lock-out screen). The M-rated Phantasmagoria, with its well-publicized rape scene, produced record sales for Sierra. The 11th Hour, a sequel to The 7th Guest, had its script published as a book, revealing the plan to include a sex scene, but the final game as released didn't include the scene (though it still featured some suggestive FMV material).
• Banner ads for Wartune had the tagline "Adult Gamers Only" (which one could tell meant "Male Gamers Only" judging from the images alone, though other ads said exactly that), and falsely carried the ESRB AO rating.
• Splatterhouse for the TurboGrafx-16 carried this unattributed quote on the cover (though the suggested age restriction was only "10 years and up"):
  "The horrifying theme of this game may be inappropriate for young children... and cowards."
  • Splatterhouse 3 was advertised as "the kind of game rating systems were invented for." (It received an MA-13 rating.)
  • The 2010 game goes out of its way to crank up the gore throws in some nude pictures of Jennifer. In-Universe, the Terror Mask lampshades this trope:
  See? This is the type of shit that got us an M-Rating.
• Duke Nukem Forever has an ESRB rating that reads more like an ad than a warning. Oddly enough, the marketing for Duke Nukem 3D didn't exploit content ratings to advertise the game's gratuitous sex and violence, though a beta version did display the RSAC advisory warning upon startup.
• The "Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2" ad campaign was made under this exact mindset. The ad garnered both criticism and praise when it first aired but is now seen retrospectively as a misfire due to its blatant sexism and Misaimed Marketing.
• Averted with Batman: Arkham Knight. Word of God says that, despite this being the first game in the series to receive a rating higher than Teen, they weren't actively trying for it and were shocked when the ESRB gave it an M rating.
  • The series' next (and so far last) title, Batman: Arkham VR, also received an M rating, though considering that it's a virtual reality game that involves Batman solving a murder, it seems that the rating was inevitable this time.
  • The Batman: Arkham Collection compilation, whether intentionally or not, plays this trope completely straight. Despite containing the previously T-rated Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, the bundle carries a straight M rating rather than the multi-rating (e.g. T-M, E-E10+) that most game compilations with different rated titles in them carry. It's possible that the inclusion of Knight, which in and of itself is barely more violent than the others due to Asylum and City being pretty hard Ts, was enough to bump the rating up, or that the ESRB didn't bother due to the collection's abrupt release.
• If a game gets a lot of attention and money for being rated M, then surely getting it even higher to AO (adults only) will make it sell even better, right? Wrong. Like the "No Cash" NC-17 rating for movies, getting an AO is a death sentence because most retailers refuse to put an AO rated game on their shelves in order to avoid problems with minors and most major publishers will also refuse to publish a game that has an AO rating in order to protect their own reputation.^note And even if stores would stock it and publishers would publish it Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft won't license an AO game, so this is a moot point for console players. The last console game to get an AO rating (other than Thrill Kill, which had its release cancelled mere months before it was to go gold after Electronic Arts acquired its publisher Virgin Interactive, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which was immediately recalled after the discovery of the "Hot Coffee" minigame) was Neurodancer for the 3DO, all the way back in 1997. For a game to get an AO rating, there has to be pornographic material in the game or extremely graphic violence. Since most businesses don't deal with porn, a game that gets an AO rating will sell very poorly, if at all. M is the magic threshold that lets game studios be able to sell to the general masses without getting into any complications and some studios try to see how far they can stretch that M rating. This applies to physical distribution of games whereas digital only games have far less hoops to jump through.
  • And in spite of this, the AO-rated Hatred rose to #1 of Steam's top sellers list upon release, thanks to plentiful No Such Thing as Bad Publicity from various sources attempting to play the role of Moral Guardians. It did get removed from Steam Greenlight briefly, but was reinstated after a significant outcry. Even with its reputation, when the game released, it turned out to be far less graphic than other games like Mortal Kombat, Gears of War, or even Grand Theft Auto, all of which had received "M" ratings and garnered much less controversy (though none of the above titles directly encourage you to murder innocent people in cold blood as does Hatred).
• Thoroughly averted by Overwatch, which is one of the biggest and most successful new gaming IPs in years, made by a Triple A company, and has gone out of its way to maintain the clean, colorful, and comparatively optimistic tone you might expect from its Pixaresque aesthetic. The fan art, on the other hand...
• The Orion Conspiracy has "CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE" in big letters right next to the rest of the game's selling points on the front of the box. While played straight in the UK with the 18+ rating, it only got a T rating from the ESRB.
• Averted with Roundabout, in which the developers were baffled by the M-rating the game got. The rating was for its blood (which is nothing more than splashes of red and no gore, though in admittedly high quantity) and for use of drugs (No Goblin assured that what the protagonist eats are candy, although drug-related jokes and lampshading are made).
• Subverted with Jazzpunk Directors Cut, which has an ESRB rating of T but contains inappropriate content descriptors so overly long you'd swear it's supposed to be attached to an M rated game or that the developers also wanted the rating to be an anti-joke that would stick out compared to the other games out that week to gain purchases.
• The indie game Electronic Super Joy practically marketed itself on being one of the very few M-rated platformers. However, once you actually look into the game, it's quite obvious that the rating was earned solely based on language and mature humor, as blood and gore is completely absent and violence is virtually nonexistent. Just to give you an idea of how easy it would have been to avoid the rating, when the game was released on the Wii U, the game was toned down due to concerns over whether it would sell on the eShop due to its rating, and all that was changed was censoring the dirty phrases, and its rating skipped T and plummeted all the way down to E10+.
• There really isn't a good reason at all for Furi to have an M rating; while the game is pretty violent, bloodshed is almost completely nonexistent, the art style is extremely colorful, and there really aren't any mature themes to found whatsoever. The fact that far more violent indie games have gotten lower ratings makes its rating even more baffling. Bar the occasional F-bomb, it probably would have gotten a T rating at most. It doesn't help at all that initial trailers for the game actually did list it as being rated T, making it seem like the F-word was added in solely to boost the rating.
• Inverted with BloodRayne: Betrayal; considering how violent and gory the game is, it's genuinely mind-blowing that the game got away with a T rating. It's actually even more violent than its predecessors, which both received M ratings.
• The Onechanbara series prides itself on containing as many stereotypical "M-rated" tropes as humanly possible. Scantily clad attractive women with extremely sexualized outfits (including DLC outfits that make the characters practically nude), gratuitous violence, blood and gore bordering on fetishistic at times, swearing... the only thing it's really missing is drugs and sex.
• BMX XXX shows how this trope can backfire. Originally the third installment in the Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series, Acclaim mandated that the game ramp up its sexual content in a desperate attempt to bring interest in the game and save the company from its deep financial woes. This backfired hard in two ways. First, Dave Mirra was understandably not happy to discover that his name was suddenly attached to a game that was being promoted as softcore porn and sued Acclaim to have his name removed, which meant the game lost its endorsement and association with a successful franchise. Second, making the game Rated M for Money not only made retailers wary of stocking the game, but it also did a great job of locking out kids and teenagers who may have otherwise bought the game, while the Fratbro demographic Acclaim was seemingly chasing didn't really exist in any capacity worth sacrificing your younger fans for. The end result was a game that earned mixed critical reviews, was largely shunned by players, and did absolutely nothing to save Acclaim, who went out of business shortly afterwards.
• Undertale, true to form, parodied it when the game was ported to the Xbox One (generally positioned as a console for mature players). The port is mostly identical to the original, but features an interactive casino in an optional area quite far off the beaten path just so the game would be pushed over to a 13+ rating—which Toby Fox was sure to highlight on his Twitter account. Averted in that the port still received the same E10+ rating as before.
• Falling Fred was advertised as "RATED 'S' for SICK people ONLY!" and featuring plenty of "Gore Galore", the latter being something many of its sequels also pride themselves on. Ironically, despite the series' gratuitous use of blood and dismemberment, its age ratings are inconsistent; the App Store releases of Falling and Super Falling (as well as the Amazon Fire release of Running Fred) were rated M, but most other versions and releases don't go past a T rating.^note Besides a few later entries being completely free of blood and gore, the level of graphic violence stays constant between games, although the sequels do have an option to turn it off if the player so desires.
• Subverted with the Fatal Frame series. The first was actually a rare example of a Teen-rated survival horror game, despite receiving harsher ratings elsewhere. The other games don’t exactly use their Mature ratings as a selling point - while the ghosts can get very disturbing, the gore is far more restrained than other games in the genre.
• Final Fantasy XVI takes a sudden swerve into "hard 18+" territory. Though it was advertised as having a more mature story than previous games in the nut-bustingly popular series, some players have noted most of the "maturity" comes from the use of dark, muddy visuals, gore, sex, and constant F-bombs (which the series had never used before outside of spinoffs), to the point it comes off as trying just a bit too hard.

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