YMMV / videogamedunkey

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The insane, bizarrely borderline non-sequitur that is his Kingdom Hearts Explained video. Fans of Kingdom Hearts made it clear that, aside from one or two jokes, Dunkey is completely accurate. He later did the same thing with the Metal Gear Solid series.
• Awesome Music:
  • Played with strangely and hilariously in Best Video Game Music.
  • In Dunkey's case, it needed its own page.
• Bizarro Episode: His Mega Man 2 LP, which becomes a lengthy and strange story about him and his rival Steinfield, rarely saying anything relevant to the game.
• Broken Base:
  • Whenever Dunkey reviews a traditional RPG, or a game with Japanese storytelling and game mechanics, he will rarely if ever give the game a good score. He has always been up front about hating aspects like turn-based combat, cliche anime story-lines, and "anime-noise" grunting & exclamations characters will do to fill gaps in a conversation. His fandom remains divided on whether he should review these games knowing his distaste for their mechanics colors how much he enjoys these games, or if he is fine reviewing them because of the possibility of him revealing he actually really likes them (as was the case with Persona 5 and Earthbound). Some also enjoy seeing him tear into a genre they dislike as well, which only furthers the debate. This issue is brought up and sarcastically Lampshaded in his mixed but overall positive review of Dragon Quest XI:
    Everybody in the entire world hates RPGs. This is a universally accepted fact. So why would I ever subject myself to a game that nobody enjoys? Well, it has a funny blue guy. This is how I pick what games to play.
  • Related to the first example, Dunkey has made his stance on anything Anime-related clear: if it's not by Studio Ghibli, he's not going to like it. Many fans are fine with this because it's something that he acknowledges as a bias in his "Game Critics" video, so it's not like his audience doesn't know what to expect if he reviews an anime game. That being said, he has taken multiple potshots at various anime games' fanbases, most notably the Xenoblade Chronicles community because it's a traditional JRPG with a few questionable characters and moments,^note "Why does the Furby who talks like Jar-Jar Binks have a Sex Slave robot!?" and in the opening of his review of Guilty Gear -STRIVE- (a game he actually likes) he makes a blanket statement that anime fans devour anything anime-related uncritically regardless of its quality. Needless to say, such inflammatory statements don't sit well with the parts of his fanbase who are also anime fans.
  • His tribute video to Robin Williams. There are those who saw it as an appropriately more serious and heartfelt video and one that Williams would have thought was hilarious, and those who felt the video was offensive and insulting to him.
  • Relaxing Space Safari got this in spades. Then again, uploading a video containing lush natural scenery onto a channel full of goofy gaming videos isn't exactly the most expected thing.
  • I'm Done With League of Legends, which argued that trash talking is not only acceptable, but one of the few things he found fun about the game, drew lots of contention. Interestingly, a group unrelated to League players, the FGC (fighting game community), who are notorious for trash talking, defended him on the grounds that as long as a person has the skill to back up their words, a person should have the right to be toxic if they want to.
  • His video on Splatoon 2 fractured his fanbase, with fans of the game believing he gave the game an unfair shake, making several glaring inaccuracies and outright failing to mention the existence of several game modes. Some even went as far as to accuse him of making several of the same mistakes he criticized game journalists over in his infamous Game Critics video. Others believe this was entirely intentional, citing the lack of a regular "Dunkview" in the title.
  • As noted under He Panned It, Now He Sucks!, his Kingdom Hearts III dunkview split the fanbase. Dunkey's criticisms about the game's Kudzu Plot, Continuity Lockout, and storytelling were met with mostly acceptance from his viewership, but his criticism of the game's engine and fighting system were met with a lot of disagreement, especially since as a whole, he unironically gave the game a 1 out of 5, which led to accusations of letting his well-known unapologetic hate towards anime color his opinion of the game to an unfair degree.
  • His glowing review of The Last of Us Part II was criticized by a large number of the fanbase as being to uncritical and failed to point out the game's many perceived flaws. Dunkey made a followup video which agreed many of the critics' points, but still mocked some of the game's diehard haters as well as other reviewers who gave it negative reviews.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Dunkey's deadpan delivery and general understated silliness can cause even some of the most grim moments to become hilarious.
  • In CS GO : Source, Dunkey threatens a kid in a very alarming way, but it's unexpected and somehow funny.
    Kid: You're so dumb because you think that, umm, the picture- that guy is Carlton Banks-
    Dunkey: Shut the FUCK up kid, I'll fucking kill you!
• Discredited Meme: Played with, then subverted in his Knack II video, where he discusses how he feels the joke got away from what it was supposed to be - namely, that Knack was a mediocre, ugly, boring game that found itself being used as a showcase for the next-generation advancements of the PS4 and completely failed to deliver. Then he manages to turn it around into making it a joke that it still got a sequel, which is the best game ever because "YOU CAN PLAY AS ICE KNACK!"
• Fountain of Memes: Has become this due to his unique manner of speech and overall absurdity to his content.
• Goddamned Bats: Dunkey loses to the frogs a lot in his Final Fantasy VII video. It eventually culminates with Sephiroth's true form being a pair of them, which he swiftly nukes with Bahamut ZERO.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • His "Bill Cosby" video, in which he played a game in which Cosby kills people and must hide them from neighbors and the police. This got much darker after hearing of Cosby's rape and sexual assault allegations.
  • His "The JonTron Rant" video, especially the "Fuck you Dunkey, I do not watch your videos because you are black." joke become a lot less funny when JonTron spoke openly about his controversial opinions regarding racial politics.
  • Everything about his videos with Sky, including the infamous "Dunkey beat Sky in Smash" meme, after Sky admitted in one of his videos that, due to personal drama, he and Dunkey are no longer friends.
  • When discussing the potential of Overwatch 2 in "Overwatch 2 : Don't be Doo Doo," Dunkey tells then-Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan to "make your move." Almost exactly a month later, Jeff Kaplan would announce his departure from Blizzard before 2 even got a release date.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • His Octopath Traveler video garnered such an immense dislike from people that it remains one of the biggest pieces of criticism about his channel even years after it came out. Not only did Dunkey seemingly intentionally misrepresent the game, either by taking cutscenes out of context such as Ophelia saying "Your excellency", or by showing gameplay of him flat out playing wrong,^{Such as...} When fighting a Giant Slug, he repeatedly hits it with sword attacks, rather than trying to exploit the snail's weaknesses. but his Reddit thread made in response flat out had him admit he basically stopped around ten hours and that he wasn't really paying attention.
  • Many were unimpressed by his extremely negative review of Death Stranding, mainly because they feel like he was completely unfair to the game and deliberately played it wrong (for example, spending much of the video trying to scale sheer cliffs, something the game expressly warns against, then claiming the controls were bad for not letting him do so). Even some who agreed that the game wasn't great felt that Dunkey went too far.
  • His Xenoblade Chronicles 2 video has gotten so much contention to the point that there's something of a Broken Base between fans of the series itself on the video. Those that don't despise the video say he's fairly speaking about criticisms already present about the game and the jokes shouldn't be taken seriously. Those that do mainly say that the presentation of the jokes in the video took things out of context and misrepresented the game, and they might have had a hand in why even years after release, there's still discourse about hotly contested surface-level misconceptions, such as Pyra's design, or the optional female rare blades allegedly making it into a "waifu-collecting game". These tend to overlap with criticism about why dunkey reviews JRPGs in the first place despite his history with them as mentioned above. What hasn't really helped this is his continued jabs at the series ever since, such as Pyra and Mythra being announced for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and a snide remark at the then-upcoming Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in his Anti-E3 2022 video.
  • When he actually covered Xenoblade Chronicles 3, all hell broke loose. His initial video was only mildly contentious given most of the Xenoblade fandom already knew he wouldn't like the game, but it received some flack for showing parts of the game considered spoilers in the early days of the game's release. Then Dunkey posted a screenshot from the game's ending on his Twitter with no context and no spoiler warning. Xenoblade fans were livid, sparking arguments all over Twitter between them and those defending Dunkey's opinions on the game.
  • His video on Multi Versus was controversial enough that the thread about the video on Dunkey's subreddit was locked shortly after it was uploaded. Even those who generally agreed with his critiques of the game questioned Dunkey's decision to spend the first half of the video complaining about the inconsistency of the roster, shortly after praising Smash for having a wide and varied roster. Dunkey pretending that the roster is full of outdated characters who nobody knows or cares about falls rather flat in the face of the game containing Batman, Superman, Bugs & Taz, Arya Stark, and other well-known characters. He then goes on to complain that a game where Bugs Bunny can throw a custard pie at Shaggy in the Batcave is "taking itself too seriously".
  • Horizon fans were not pleased with "Horizon Forbidden Game", where he essentially slaps the game with a So OK, It's Average label and claims that there's literally no reason to buy and play it when you could buy Elden Ring instead. Many took issue with the fact that he had clearly used Manipulative Editing to make it seem like Machine battles were a minor part of the game compared to the generic human enemies^note The only footage he shows of him fighting machines is hitting a single Scrounger with a spear attack near the beginning of the game, when in that same sequence you have to drop a rusted space shuttle on three gigantic snake robots and fight a damaged one with its own tail weapon, and the footage of human enemies that he used is the only quest in the entire game where you have to fight the Eclipse cultists from the first game due to them being The Remnant, and neglecting to mention that those not interested in the story and dialogue can simply select the dialogue options with the quest marker and skip through all of it, making his criticism that the game talks at you way too much fall flat when the dialogue is easily skippable^note He also didn't bring up that every single conversation optional or otherwise in the game is uniquely motion-captured, rectifying complaints about the stiff, wooden dialogue from Horizon Zero Dawn.
  • It happened again with his video on Sonic Frontiers. Many Sonic fans accused Dunkey on Twitter of deliberately trying to make the game look worse than it was, either by going out of his way to find bugs or exaggerating the game's Railroading tendencies, along with more frustration akin to the above Xenoblade 3 controversy by spoiling the game's Final Boss in the video. It got to the point where fans accused Dunkey's fans of review-bombing the game when the video dropped, with Dunkey later claiming that the fans were doing it themselves to try and make his fanbase look bad, and fans of the series firing back by pointing out how SEGA has a history of responding to poor reviews by scrapping everything and trying something new and accusing him of cherry-picking a few of the low-score reviews to try and pass the blame.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Dunkey's ''Smash Bros 4: Dream Roster'' video features Mario and Olimar discussing which characters they want in the new Super Smash Bros. game. This video came out two weeks before Olimar was revealed for the new game.
  • In his ''Top 100 Games'' video, Dunkey rates The Last of Us at #65 and says it looks pretty fun before saying that of course, it's not out yet, months before panning the game in his review of it.
  • One of his League videos is "Dubstep Singed". Come 2015, and the ultimate skin is DJ Sona, a dubstep-inspired skin.
  • In "History of Gaming", Dunkey makes a joke about a sequel to Knack. A couple of years later, Knack 2 was officially announced at PlayStation Experience 2016.
  • In Remakes and Remasters, he responds to Skyrim Special Edition with an exasperated "Seriously, Nintendo?" When the Nintendo Switch was revealed in October 2016, what was one of the games announced for the system? That's right, a new version of Skyrim.
  • His "Best of 2016" video features Sonic 3 & Knuckles in the #10 spot, and includes a clip of Dunkey trying to imitate the sound effect the boosters in Hydrocity Zone make when Sonic boards them. Fast forward seven months down the line, and Sonic Mania has this exact voice clip as an Easter Egg for Hydrocity Zone unlockable by a Cheat Code. Unfortunately, it was removed in Sonic Mania Plus.
  • In his trailer "analysis" for the reveal trailer for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, at one point his speculates that two characters are Sans and Papyrus (whom he jokingly refers to as "Sam" and "Wingding", respectively). Cue the September 4, 2019 Nintendo Direct, where Sans was announced as a Mii Costume.
  • During his Monster Hunter: World video he jokingly describes Nergigante's Dive Bomb attack as being able to "one shot kill you, but also the hitbox is bigger than the entire level". World would later add Behemoth as a DLC fight whose Ecliptic Meteor move literally has both of those properties.
  • Whether if this is considered to be Harsher in Hindsight, Dunkey's quotes about how 2020 is "where the shit goes down" and that 2019 was the "calm before the storm" during his best video games of 2019 video became more relevant as people began to understand how burdening (and awful to many, especially those in the United States) the year has been.
  • While Dunkey is playing Injustice 2, he said as Robin "Fuck you, I'm gay!" Tim Drake came out as bisexual in an August 2021 comic.
  • In his Pokemon: Let's Go Pikachu joke review, Dunkey claims that one of the reasons the turn-based combat sucks is because it "doesn't have a dodge roll." Years later, Game Freak released Pokémon Legends: Arceus, an Actionized Sequel that has a dodge roll. Dunkey himself noted this in his review of the latter game.
  • In his gameplay video of Spider-Man (PS4), he jokingly claims that because there's no Bone Saw or Big Wheel,^note A c-list Spider-Man villain from the comics whom Dunkey repeatedly jokes about he'll have to give it a 0/5. Come the release of Marvel's Spider-Man 2, there's a ferris wheel in the game which is actually called "Big Wheel" as a Mythology Gag, which Dunkey shows footage of in "Gamers Review Spider-Man 2" over a hyperbolic review talking about how it's the greatest game of all time.
  • "The 10 Year Wait for GTA 6" is a narration-less montage of fans' increasing desperation and grasping at straws over Rockstar Games' complete silence over Grand Theft Auto VI, with Dunkey's only comment being a video description reading "I have it on good intel it will come out next week". Four days later, Rockstar finally announced a GTA 6 reveal trailer would be released in early December.
  • One section of "Dunkey's Guide to Streaming Services" shows how difficult it is to watch the entire Pokémon: The Series through various streaming services, several seasons of which are on the Pokémon TV app/site. Less than three days after this video was released, the Pokémon Company announced it was shutting down Pokémon TV.
• Memetic Mutation: As expected.
  • Dunkey's Catchphrase, "Not even close, baby!" has become something of a meme to League of Legends players.
  • "Wid' da moneeey..."
  • "This reminds me of the time Dunkey beat Sky in Smash" or any variations thereof.
  • "This game has a rating of <X> Haunted."^note Used to describe horror games in general, usually Silent Hill or Resident Evil.
  • "Thank you, Dark Souls."
  • "The graphics, that's really what this is all about."^note From his "Future of Gaming" video, mocking Jerry Rice's interview promoting Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football.
  • "You're that ninja..."^note Gained popularity through his Metal Gear Solid video, wherein he repeatedly splices the aforementioned quote with Snake's constant Parrot Exposition.
  • "It was a accident!" and any of its variations.^note Expect him to utter this as either a dumb excuse or as a prelude to trolling or doing something incredibly stupid.
  • "I'll have the spaghetti and meatballs."
  • "I don't watch Dunkey because he's black."^note Initially from "The Jontron Rant", this also evolved from another meme where videos with Dunkey's face in them had lots of comments claiming to have thought that he was black based on his voice.
  • Knack.
  • "Hey, can I get a pep-pep-aroni?"
  • Super Mario Bros. 2, baby! Game of the Year every year since 1988!
  • "It really makes you feel like X."^note In his video on game critics, he criticizes the stale nature of professional game reviews by noting how many reviews of Batman: Arkham Asylum claim that the game makes the player "feel like Batman". Expect to see many variations of this phrase in the comments of his videos and those of other online reviewers in particular, IGN.
  • "I like your attitude!"^note A phrase repeated by Rex several times in Dunkey's Xenoblade Chronicles 2 video.
  • "This looks like a good spot to search for ingredients!" ^note A phrase repeated by Donald in Kingdom Hearts III, even when underwater. While the video itself split his fanbase, everyone could agree that this part was hilarious.
  • Beeg Yoshi/"He's just sitting there..."
  • "I'm wearing a blindfold." (Or other permutations thereof.)^note From his Super Mario Maker 2 videos whenever he dies while playing a hard course.
  • Is this the guy with the world record on Bowser's Big Bean Burrito?
  • LAUGH!! LAUGH!!!^Explanation  Dunkey tells a terrible joke in his Comedy Night video as a vehicle to screech this into the microphone. It picked up a use as a sort of rimshot substitute, being slapped right after a joke that is incredibly painful, obvious, or both.
  • "Your Excellency."^note From his review of Octopath Traveler, where he makes fun of how often Ophilia calls her adoptive father "Your Excellency" (see the Values Dissonance example on that game's YMMV page for more details).
  • "Nope, you are nitpicking and biased, I win, bye bye."^note A phrase from his second video on game critics, criticizing how people abuse internet anonymity to be rude and illogical.
  • "I have not played X."^note Another phrase from his second video on game critics, mocking a detractor who criticized his Octopath Traveler review who admitted he has not played the game himself.
  • "It has a little something for everyone."^note A phrase from both of his videos on game critics, criticizing how reviewing websites like IGN often give popular games high reviews which averts gamer backlash. The quote in question comes from an IGN review of New Super Mario Bros. U.
  • "The first strand type game."^note From his scathing review of Death Stranding, mocking Hideo Kojima's use of the term and comparing the "genre" to Super Mario Bros., which Dunkey jokingly calls the first true "strand type" game.
  • "This is like (x) at (y)'s house!"/"Tail Time!"/Gex.^note The format of a large variety of the jokes in the Gex series of games (with (x) and (y) often being incredibly outdated references), which Dunkey found repetitive. The format has become a default template for jokes in the Dunkey fandom since the release of the second Gex video. Surprisingly, has nothing to do with the Gex meme within Scott The Woz's fandom, which ascended to memehood for very different reasons.
  • "Zero Dislikes."^note After his "Dislikes are Disabled" video, where Dunkey notes that YouTube has hidden dislike counts and makes a number of satirical hot takes while mocking his viewers for being unable to dislike his video in a way that apparently counts. Comments said that he must be correct because the video has "zero dislikes."
  • "Yet Sephiroth once again intervened." ^note A sound clip from the story recap for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which Dunkey plays repeatedly in his video on the game in response to Sephiroth's many appearances.
• Misaimed Fandom: Many interpreted Dunkey absolutely steamrolling every trainer in his video on Pokémon Sword and Shield as the game just being way too easy. If you look at the level of his Pokemon the few times they're visible, though, you can see that they are often long past the level of their opponents.
• Never Live It Down: Dunkey's friend Sky Williams is now known commonly as the guy Dunkey beat in Smash.
• Nightmare Fuel: Now with its own page.
• Older Than They Think: Apparently before Dunkey started his channel in 2010, he had a channel called Meatwadsprite that he started in 2008. Before that, he made a channel called jmonkey21 in 2006. Before that, he had a Newgrounds channel dating back to as early as 2003.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: "Relaxing Space Safari". All the way.

---