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  • Magic Feather: "Don't you see? The [skill/object] was in you all along!" One episode had him saying there was a reverse magic feather ("Ha, ha! Don't you see? The fuck-up was in you all along!")
  • Manic Pixie Dream Girl:
    • Brought up in the SimCity review, with reference to the trope's poster girl:
    "Listen to me, EA! Not every introvert is longing for the day that Zooey fucking Deschanel kicks their door down and forcibly drags them to a roller rink!"
  • Massive Multiplayer Crossover: Has teamed up with Moviebob and James Portnow to form Extra Consideration, a panel in which all three discuss the state of the gaming scene. Jim Sterling of Jimquisition has now joined the panel as well.
  • Master of None:
    • One of his major complaints about AAA games is that he sees many of them as this; they are meant to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and so end up often including tons of different gameplay styles without managing to nail down a single style that works, and without making any of those styles truly essential or important. He brings up the trope by name when discussing Brütal Legend, which is a hybrid of a wide-open sandbox, a real-time-strategy, and a hack-and-slasher, but he felt it didn't do particularly well at any of the above (partly because those gameplay styles don't mesh well). It's also an element of his critique of Fallout 4, a game that tried to be a shooter, a base-builder, a crafting-and-survival game, an open-world game, an RPG, and a narrative experience, and so ended up with an easy shooter, a token base-builder, a boring crafter, a repetitive open-worlder, a shallow RPG, and a weak narrative experience.
    • The complaint resurfaced in his review of Fallout 76, where he said that he believed the game failed because it tried to achieve a balance between being a story-heavy Fallout RPG focused on the singleplayer experience, and an MMO survival game where players make their own story and work together with others a la Rust. The result was a game with a lot of story and RPG elements too underdeveloped to work, while the multiplayer and survival aspects felt shallow and gutted and he rarely even saw other players.
    • He ultimately codifies this model by describing what he calls the "Jiminy Cockthroat" subgenre: open-world games that incorporate elements of stealth, crafting, collecting, and RPG elements. As one might expect from the name, it is not complimentary. The defining idea to him of the subgenre is that these games are designed such that you can "play it your way", which typically means that the systems involved are neither fleshed-out enough to stand on their own nor interconnected enough to meaningfully cohere.
    • "Three Things, Somewhere, Quarter 4 2027" focuses on over-ambitious Kickstarter MMO projects that promise a game that lets the player "do anything" with all sorts of systems, and end up failing on all fronts. In contrast, successful games are more focused on what they want to be and deliver a better experience for it.
  • Meat Moss: He calls it "jam" in his review of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
    "Oh, pissing BLIMEY, there's JAM coming out of the walls!"
  • Medal of Dishonor:
    "That should roughly be around the time apes have retaken the Earth."
    • The "Turd in a Turd" Award for Unsurprising Poor Quality went to Sonic Unleashed, his reasoning being that Sonic Team is deliberately trying to be awful and hitting the mark perfectly.
  • Medium Awareness: During his review of Wolfenstein: Youngblood, he comments that he could count the games which made a success of Youngblood's approach on the fingers of one hand — "and I don't have any fingers on my hand, 'cause it's a featureless white circle".
  • Men Don't Cry: Parodied in his inFAMOUS 2 review.
    "I'm not to proud to admit that I was welling up at inFAMOUS 2's good ending, a little bit. Well, not much at all really. It was more like stoically nodding my head while doing squat-thrusts and grunting."
    "In contrast, I played Spiritfarer, got to the part where an old hedgehog with dementia remembers who I am in the brief moment before she disappears, and I CRIED. I actually did; fuck you."
  • Mercy Kill: What he says must be done with Sonic the Hedgehog.
  • Metaphorgotten: Frequently, considering how many strange metaphors Yahtzee uses.
    "It's like wrestling an excitable dog in a paddling pool full of disembodied breasts. *Beat* Don't think too much about that simile, I certainly didn't."
    • Especially when it's a hot summer day and his AC isn't working. "Really good like... something... good that's... made out of chocolate..."
    • This Extra Punctuation takes the metaphor of "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and keeps stretching it until he reckons "I think this is already the best metaphor I've ever written."
    • In his Batman: Arkham Origins review, to illustrate the importance of keeping D-list villains out of a Batman game, he explains how his greatest villains all reflect an aspect of the caped crusader.
    "Two-Face reflects his duality, Scarecrow his use of fear and psychological tactics, Poison Ivy his— er, shapely buttocks.(?)"
    "People who live in glass houses, Duke Nukem Forever, shouldn't make ugly, frustrating, poorly-optimized games."
    • His review of Gravity Rush described the gravity-shifting mechanics thus:
    "The first press cancels your gravity and puts you into hover mode, the second picks a new gravity. It's like having to stop the car and put it in neutral before you can change gear. And your car dresses like a whore."
    "Hey America... people who live in glass houses... should probably get around to closing Guantanamo Bay one of these days..."
    "Still, the range of elemental powers on display are pretty creative, although the word "elemental" is getting stretched like a mozzarella bumhole at the novelty sausage gala— what am I on about?"
    • From his review of Quantum Conundrum, when talking about the glove that lets you switch between alternate dimensions:
    "It's kind of like a glove-mounted cocktail dispenser except it alters the physical properties of things other than your own legs. There's the piña colada dimension, where everything is light and fruity; the Black Russian dimension, where things sit much more heavily and you start clutching your head complaining about your ex-wife; the absinthe dimension, where everything floats off into the sky to come crashing apocalyptically down the following morning; and the slow motion dimension, where this analogy kind of breaks down."
    • "I feel like making a game in Dreams would be like cleaning a bathroom floor with the eyelashes of a horse. Impressive, yes, but there were much easier ways. And you'll have very little use for all that horse-wrangling expertise you had to learn if you want to move into cleaning bathroom floors on a professional level. Even moreso after Sony inevitably decides it can't be bothered to support clean bathroom floors anymore and turns the servers off, sending everyone's hard work right down the bathroom drain. Yes, I have completely lost the fucking thread of this metaphor."''
    • His review of Metroid Dread has him come this with Who Writes This Crap?!, following his complaint about the Switch's Joy-Cons giving him difficulty with certain button combinations:
    "But isn’t that largely my fault, for not having gotten around to paying kindly Uncle Nintendo another seventy bucks for a pro controller that doesn’t stick drift like a glue tanker on a wet road— Jesus Christ, when did I write that?!"
  • Meta Twist: Discussed - he feels that the "shocking" moment in the Modern Warfare games has become so token that by the end of the third game, it'd be more shocking if there wasn't one.
  • Money for Nothing: He brings this up in his reviews of both the later Assassin's Creed games and the Fable series, saying that useful items are either fairly cheap or can't be bought, and the biggest Money Sinks provided no real advantage except even more money, resulting in situations where he buys up way too much stuff just to have something to spend the money on, and then ends up with more than he started.
  • Monster Closet: His lambasting of the trope in Dead Space 2 provides the page quote.
  • Monster Clown: He suggests that there must have been one working at Airtight Games who the staff were too frightened of to say no to, explaining why there are so many bad decisions in the design of Murdered: Soul Suspect.
  • Mood Dissonance: While not a deal-breaker for Yahtz and he admits that this is very much a subjective quibble for him, tonal clash between the gameplay, story and other elements of a game can take him out of a game fairly easily. He especially took Sonic Frontiers to task for setting itself in environments that look like Death Stranding, but then making you play through them as Sonic the Hedgehog, "a blue cartoon mouse in sneakers with eyes the size of hubcaps".
    • He elaborates on this further in his Extra Punctuation video "We Need To Have A Conversation About Your Tone", where he rags on God of War Ragnarök for interrupting a silly haggis anecdote with violent brutal combat, only to pick the haggis story right back up again.
  • Mood Whiplash: Feels that the cutscenes in Twisted Metal causes this, with the incredible silliness of Vehicular Combat contrasting with a VERY dark story that he admits is a bit frightening.
  • Mordor: Nintendo's corporate HQ in Bowser's Inside Story.
  • Moral Guardian: In his 3DS review he states how he's trying his best to not sound like one of these while criticizing the potentially malicious acts people can do with the "StreetPass" feature.
    • One of his "Occasional Guide To Special Moments In Gaming History" videos focuses on these people and the controversy surrounding the Hot Coffee mod from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
  • More Dakka: His review of Spore shows the civilization stage as imps strafing other imps' cities from the air, with the caption "Dakka Dakka" under the war planes.
  • Motor Mouth: "Zero Punctuation" comes from how he has a tendency to ramble on and on so quickly that his speech has almost no pauses, and thus there is zero punctuation. More or less.
    • He has said he edits out the pauses, but definitely does not speed up his voice.
    • He was strangely slow in his delivery of the review of Lego City Undercover; this may be ascribed to the post-BioShock Infinite melancholy he claims to be suffering from.
    • This is taken a bit further than usual in the end of his FIFA 13 review, after getting distracted from reviewing it by several other downloadable games:
    "How much time do I have left? 8 SECONDS? FUCK!! Uh, FIFA 13 is a game in which you and your burly friends help a small leather sphere realize its dream of being in a net, and I think we can all agree that that's basically a positive thing. Nighty night."
  • Mugging the Monster: In his Fallout: New Vegas review, he mentions that it occurred to him that it might be a good idea to stop stealing things. After getting attacked by bandits and taking their stuff, he mentions it is not stealing because they attacked him, which makes it his by the international law of "Go Fuck Yourselves."
  • Mundane Made Awesome: When talking about the wet clothing feature in Uncharted, he talks a bit too much about it, considering it means absolutely nothing in terms of plot or gameplay. He realizes this, of course, stating at the end of his praise "Well, I think it's interesting!".
  • My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Despite being a Misanthrope Supreme in general, he often displays sympathic views towards people of color, particularly those in the developing world. One of his common complaints with the "Spunkgargleweewee" genre is often being forced to kill dark-skinned foreigners for no apparent reason other than America being xenophobic. He also once mocked the idea of white Americans being offended by a joke from a race they once enslaved.
  • Mythology Gag: During his Final Fantasy XIII review, Yahtzee separates each hour he played the game with a brief break showing a black screen with the unit of time and then which unit he's on (Hour 1, Hour 2, Hour 3, etc.). He used a similar mechanism with three of the games in the Chzo Mythos.
  • Nerdgasm: Has made a few references to getting erections at really good games.
  • Nerds Are Virgins: Has made quite a few jokes about that. Especially notable on his review for Catherine:
    (Increasingly amused) "... there's a moral choice aspect where you answer questions based on your own substantial experience with relationships *stifled laughter* " (accompanying visual is of a fat glasses-wearing guy sitting next to a blow-up doll.)
  • Newer Than They Think: invokedHe argues this is why it would be misplaced to claim the popularity of Doom (2016) proves that Doom holds up—while it does call back to the original, most of the reboot's core design elements were tried and tested in later games, and the two really don't play much alike. In particular, he cites the heavy focus on aerial maneuvering, claiming that the Quake games were the actual pioneers on that front: as he put it, "DOOM (2016) would be nothing without verticality, so if I were to pick its primary influence, it wouldn't be a game that had no fucking "Jump" button."
  • Nightmare Fuel:invoked
    • The Kinectimals' box art is "the most terrifying thing I've seen all year. It looks like what would happen if John Wayne Gacy went to Disneyland."
    • Also makes this comment about the cutscenes in Twisted Metal, feeling they seem better suited for a horror film that an over the top Vehicular Combat game.
    • Discussed regarding his review of Five Nights at Freddy's as how it's possible to be too scary. Yahtzee found the game and its genuinely paralyzing dread of the unknown to be "a remarkable recreation of the kind of logic one encounters in a nightmare," but that was to its detriment as it stopped making it a horror game with some level of entertaining catharisis and more just a masochistic exercise of anxiety.
  • Nightmare Retardant:invoked He states that Alice: Madness Returns made Creepy Dolls not creepy just by the fact that the game uses it constantly to the point where players just get used to it.
  • Nintendo Hard: Yahtzee prides himself on as having been playing video games since early childhood and frequently recalls how hard they were back then. He routinely mocks prospective critics who complain about the difficulty level in games these days, as well as people who accuse him of not liking a game because he finds it too hardinvoked. That said, games with ridiculously impossible sequences, he blasts with both barrels.
    • He felt that Demon's Souls offered too much of a challenge without a sufficient reward, and gave up after trying to get across the Red Dragon-guarded bridge leading to the Tower Knight.
      • Surprisingly averted with its spiritual successor, which he actually turned out to quite like.
    • However he did enjoy I Wanna Be the Guy, though he states that no person, unless it's for charity should ever try Impossible difficulty.
      • This trope is why he quit playing The Witcher 2 - and to be fair, he played it when enemies could knock Geralt down mid-swing (and KEEP knocking him down), and before a tutorial was added to acclimatize players to the controls.
  • No Such Thing as Bad Publicityinvoked: Discussed in "Acclaim Entertainment Hall of Shame", with the central subject being Acclaim and their various publicity stunts from the late-90's/early-2000's that Yahtzee considered a relentless — and ultimately, failed — attempt to test the adage. Yahtzee's conclusion is that controversial or messy marketing stunts can only be truly effective if the product being sold is actually any good, as while Acclaim's antics did get them the attention and headlines they were looking for, nobody was actually sticking around to buy their games because the products themselves were hashed-out junk with little ambition or innovation, leaving them a subject of widespread mockery and bankrupt.
  • Noah's Story Arc: During his story of the "Corrupted Blood" incident in World of Warcraft, he imagines this scenario in which "Blizzard had no option but to contact one of the figureheads of the quarantine effort and have him construct a giant wooden boat in which he was directed to place two of every monster so that they could send a rainstorm for forty days and forty nights" before fessing up with a "Nah, I'm fucking with you; they just hard-reset the servers. Bit anticlimactic, really."
  • No Fourth Wall: Technically doesn't qualify as there's no suspension of disbelief, but a review still pushed back the boundaries when Yahtzee addressed the viewer as "Adrian", and noted that while that's not particularly likely to be any given viewer's name, "it was worth it to freak out all the Adrians in the world."
    "If you've been paying attention, you'll notice that all these games are sequels. And if you haven't... *claps twice* OI!"
    "Stop watching my reviews, Dad!"
    • The Super Mario Galaxy 2 review has the distinction of genuinely breaking the fourth wall, as Yahtzee suggest pausing the video, while his avatar points to the pause button on the video player.
    "I shouldn't have to talk about the core gameplay, I consider that an insult to you and me. My review of Mario Galaxy 1 hasn't gone anywhere, why not pause this video, pour yourself a glass of wine and go and enjoy that. I'll just wait here slapping myself in the face until you return. *cut to black, slapping sounds and Yahtzee groaning, then cut back, Yahtzee now with a bruised face* Finished? Right, well, Mario Galaxy 2 is more of that."
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: At the end of most reviews, there's a couple of still shots during the credits and theme-music with a little joke about the game. In the case of Final Fantasy XIII, there was no punchline, just Yahtzee beating and shooting Vanille to pieces in increasingly elaborate ways.
  • "No. Just… No" Reaction: How the review of The Conduit began.
  • Non-Indicative Name: Not long after coining the phrase "BioWare Bro Buffet" to describe games that are mostly about building a squad of True Companions, it occurred to him that BioWare actually seemed to be fairly bad at it, as he liked the companions of Persona 5 and Pyre a lot more than those of any recent BioWare games, and spent much of his Mass Effect: Andromeda review talking about how he loathed the game's cast.
    • One of the ways in which the Rise of the Triad remake remained faithful to the original game is that "it's still fuck all to do with Triads".
  • Noodle Implements: The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. review: ...and whistled for a baboon.
  • Noodle Incident: The end of the Fallout: New Vegas video says "I hope the war in Las Vegas destroyed that ice machine I threw up in".
    • "Now I've never invaded Europe, except for that one time..."
    • "I know I can't speak for everyone, at least not until the device is completed, but..."
  • Nostalgia Filter:
    • Yahtzee often cautions his viewers against this, as nostalgia is often used by triple-A developers to trick the buying public into accepting formula over innovation. He also tends to deride fans who wear nostalgia goggles for particular games, especially those that have aged poorly, and one of his main gripes with crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter is the overabundance of spiritual sequels or nostalgic retreads that gain massive success and popularity. That said, he’s not afraid to admit when he himself is falling into to the same trap. He caught himself really trying to like Duke Nukem Forever despite its many horrendous flaws, as he enjoyed the original Duke Nukem 3D and desperately wanted the new game to be good after thirteen years of development hell.
    • Admits to be have suffered from it himself in his review of Half-Life, where he admitsthat he had fewer other games growing up and can recite the game from memory. He not only admits to have ignored flaws in the game, though he still enjoyed it, but also that it represents aspects of retro-shooters he hates, like platforming sections, from a first person perspective. Conversely when he did a retro review of Half-Life 2 he found that it didn't hold up quite as well as he'd remembered.
    • This is mostly the joke behind the running gag of naming Fantasy World Dizzy to be the greatest game of all time - it's a slow, shallow, clunky, ugly, obtuse Commodore 64 platformer that has aged like milk, but because he played it when he was a kid, that makes it the standard all games since have failed to meet.
    • He brings this up in his discussions of games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Shovel Knight, with him pondering what it means that he appreciates them so much despite no nostalgia for the genre. Indeed, part of his interest in retro games is figuring out whether they can still hold up to the eye of someone who didn't have much experience with them in his youth.
  • Not Helping Your Case: Yahtzee felt that Mortal Kombat 9 wasn't helping with gamers' attempts to convince the public at large that video games aren't Murder Simulators.
    "Here's me living for the day the mainstream media understands that video games aren't just mindless violence for twelve-year-old future Unabombers, and Mortal Kombat isn't helping my case. It's like a sitcom moment wherein Character X defends the intelligence of Character Y while in the background Character Y is busy snorting Drano off the back of an enraged lioness."
  • Not Himself: Wait, what's this? Resistance 3 has no regenerating health? A sum of weapons greater than 2? No chest-high walls? "Erm... Sony, are you alright?"
  • "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
    • Describing the ending of Condemned 2: Bloodshot, and says "I wish I was fucking kidding!"
    • And revealing the final boss of Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days.
    • In his review of Epic Mickey, he brings up a Mickey Mouse comic where he tries to kill himself after Minnie breaks up with him.
    • Uses this in Painkiller when describing a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning. This is a rare positive example, as he states that "the only way this weapon could be more awesome would be if it had tits and was on fire!"
    • After mentioning a particularly invoked narmful line spoken by Remember Me's protagonist, he then states that, yes, it really is in the game as displayed verbatim.
    • In his review of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, as he's talking about Raiden's robotic dog companion, on the screen are, in big letters, "NO REALLY" and "A THING THAT HAPPENS".
    • He points out that you really can "bully the monsters into giving up and take their lunch money" in Persona 5.
    • In his Acclaim Entertainment 'Hall of Shame' video, he clarifies that Sony really did parade a dead goat around at God of War III's launch party.note 
    • In his review of Paper Mario: The Origami King, when he reveals that there is a boss fight against a Hole Punch, something he had sarcastically suggested in a previous Paper Mario review.
    • When he was briefly mini-reviewing Code Vein in his "2019 Game I Haven't Reviewed Roundup" he pointed out out that your homebase really does have a built-in hot spring, where sexy girls in Modesty Towels will come in and join you when you sit in it. "This is a thing that happens. It built a Fanservice Hot Springs Episode into its fucking mechanics."
    • In his review of Amnesia: Rebirth he criticises the time the protagonist "takes the public subway train in the evil Lovecraftian dimension and misses her stop because the map was confusing" and insists "No really, this happens".
    • In his review of Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom, he describes it as a "twee cartoon fantasy JRPG". When he gets to the story, he describes the opening as gritty and realistic: "The president of the United States is on his way to a summit of the UN when the city he's driving through gets hit by a direct nuclear strike." He then reassures the viewer that, yes, this happens in Ni No Kuni II.
  • Not So Above It All:
    'Every time they bring out another one I go "Maybe this time it'll be good again!" and dutifully jam my dick in the beehive, and I'm beginning to think that the one time I didn't get stung on the pisshole might've been the outlier.'
    • One recurring joke he makes at the expense of mainstream, shounen-skewing anime and animesque games are that their respective fandoms exclusively discuss "waifus" and arguing over who is the "best girl". In his Extra Punctuation on "Why I Like Persona in Spite of it Being A JRPG", he brings this topic up again, expressing annoyance in how despite the likes of Persona 4 and 5 sincerely winning him over on a critical and emotional level, he still finds such discussions about who is the "best girl" insipid and tiresome... and that it's Chie.
  • No True Scotsman: Jokingly, he explains that he doesn't consider the Mario RPGs to be JRPGs, because "a JRPG just isn’t a JRPG unless it ends with teenagers using the Power of Friendship to kill God."
    • He references the trope in his review of The Sims, where he admits that he wanted to use the excuse of not liking casual games to avoid reviewing it.
    • He also namedropped the trope as reason he didn't simply use the "the majority of players of The Sims are all casual gamers and therefore don't count" argument to cover his distaste for the series in his review of The Sims 3.
  • Obligatory Joke: Yahtzee begins his review of Maneater by rapid-firing the chorus to Daryl Hall & John Oates' song "Maneater" and then saying "okay, now that that's out of the way, let's start this review".
  • Observation on Originality: Numerous reviews allude to this concept. His running metaphor about Branston Pickle (to describe something so original and distinctive that it must be appreciated in spite of its flaws) more or less amounts to this trope.
  • Oh, Crap!: In his FIFA 13 review, after he's been distracted from reviewing the game throughout the video:
  • Once an Episode: Tends to draw characters skipping hand-in-hand, The Wizard of Oz-style frequently.
  • Old Shame: Yahtzee has admitted at least twice he used to watch Pokémon: The Series when he was a kid. While some people might not consider this shameful, he certainly does. invoked
  • 100% Completion: Defied Trope. By his own admission, Yahtzee has trouble understanding the completionist mentality and tends to think lowly of games like Pokémon that bank on it as their selling point. This also extends to games like Yoshi's Island and Tembo the Badass Elephant that emphasize the need to find all the secrets to "properly" complete a level.
    "Striving for 100% completion is for unemployed psychotics and Koreans."
    • In his Yoshi's Crafted World review, he darkly suspects that introducing Hundred Per Cent Completion to video games was the origin of the industry exploiting the obsessive instinct of completionists, which itself indirectly lead to the modern-day proliferation of lootboxes and live service games. Although he admits he might be being "a touch hysterical" about that.
  • The Oner: Discussed as the subject of heavy criticism in God of War (2018) and God of War Ragnarök (which famously scripts all the gameplay and cutscenes in seamless, unbroken fashion), which he saw as emblematic of the games' core problem of invokednot cutting anything out and being far too excessive and padded for their own good. Yahtzee specifically complained about the overuse of Dynamic Loading by forcing the player to squeeze through narrow caves in name of preserving the shtick, which he just saw as an increasingly obvious trick, and annoying enough that by Ragnarok, he was sincerely asking for a traditional Loading Screen.
    Yahtzee: What's with this obsession with never cutting away? Cutting away is fine! Remember in Taxi Driver when Robert De Niro decides to shoot up a pimp's house, and they just cut to him doing that? Remember how they didn't show him buying a subway ticket to the pimp's house and sitting on a train for half an hour, muttering about how much fun he's going to have shooting it up?
  • Only One Female Mold: Criticizes both World of Warcraft and Dragon Age II for this.
    "...universally identical bodies that leave Hawke's elderly mother with the same massive, curvaceous bosoms as a table dancer, Freud Freud."
    "...the male orcs, trolls, and undead are all hunched, twisted monstrosities while the females are basically just discolored human hotties with bad dentistry."
  • Only the Creator Does It Right: In-universe, he has taken this attitude with regards to several franchises, most notably the Silent Hill series, for which he criticized every Western-developed entry in the series for missing the mark or failing to live up to the standard of the original four Japanese games (with Silent Hill 2 in particular being one of his favourite games of all time). This became particularly ironic when he named Spec Ops: The Line his game of the year for 2012, despite it being an entry in an established franchise which none of the original creators had any involvement in. Then again, prior to The Line he'd never given an ounce of freeze-dried shit for the Spec Ops franchise anyway (a not-uncommon opinion, as even our very wiki doesn't even have a page for the series apart from The Line).
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
    • Spec Ops: The Line depressed him so much that he actually took a huge pause near the end of the review and sighed wearily before wrapping up. The game went on to be his pick for Best Game of 2012.
    • Yahtzee's reviews of most games tend to be fairly long and descriptive, even ones that he says are decent. For Undertale, however, his review of the game consists of only one sentence: "Undertale is a good game." The game went on to be Yahtzee's Game of the Year for 2015. note 
    • Although Yahtzee has a well deserved reputation as an angry guy, most of his many criticisms and jokes are done in a mildy annoyed, deadpan voice, showing more disinterested disgust and burnt-out disappointment. As such, when he shows genuine anger, it is both surprising and a sign that whatever he's taking about goes beyond "the usual bullshit". At the same time, it also makes his moments of sadness or (rare) happiness stand out like a sore thumb.
    • Yatzee held off on swearing to emphasise that he genuinely hated the Battletoads reboot.
    • Yahtzee generally doesn't say whether viewers should or shouldn't buy a game. As such when he goes out of his way to clearly say to not buy a game, such as with MindJack and Oddworld Soulstorm, his hatred for the game is obvious.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
    • Happens a fair deal with his ridiculous Irish accent in the Tales of Monkey Island episode.
    • Also the Far Cry 2 episode, where he switches back and forth from his normal English accent and a horrible South African accent.
  • Orphaned Punchline: "...and whistled for a baboon!"
  • Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Parodied.
    The problem is that this isn't a Paper Mario game. It looks like one, it wears the skin of one, but that doesn't make it one! I am not a fat woman, even though I've- I've just been advised not to finish this sentence. (with the accompanied image of him wearing the bloody skin of a fat woman.)
  • Out of the Frying Pan: In his review of Velvet Assassin, he notes that the bullet time mechanic in the stealth sections is—unless used under precise circumstances—liable to backfire and leave the player worse off than before.
    ...then the "fuckup remedy" has instead resulted in what we experts call "boomerang fuckkup".
  • Overly Long Gag: See Big "NO!".
  • Overly Narrow Superlative: A joke he pulls out occasionally, perhaps most triumphantly when he called Soma "the second best atmospheric narrative horror game with philosophical themes set at the bottom of the ocean with an existential plot twist in it...of all time."
  • Parrot Exposition: A parody of Metal Gear Solid's famous tendency for this:
    Otacon: Metal Gear
    Snake: Metal Gear?
    Otacon: Metal Gear!
    Snake: Bugger me!
  • Parting-Words Regret: Invoked metaphorically when talking about Paper Mario: Color Splash. He beings up how he was hard on Super Paper Mario and ended that review by suggesting the game was evidence that the series should be put to bed and then smothered to death, and the graphics showed him doing so. But now that the series has in his eyes gotten several orders of magnitude worse, he finds himself thinking about all of the things he now wishes he had said to Super Paper Mario before doing that.
  • Pandering to the Base: invoked
  • Pet-Peeve Trope: He's got a few.
  • Pet the Dog:
    • In an Extra Punctuation, although he couldn't sympathize with gamers who cried at Aerith's death in FFVII, he said that the emotions they felt were real and no one could call them fake or wrong.
    • In his "review" of The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, he reveals that despite all the vitriol he's given Nintendo over the years, he's actually on their side in the next generation if only because they're the only ones who "released a game console, not an inferior gaming PC for people who dream of being the sub in an unhealthy techno-masochistic fantasy." By the same token, in his The 2010's Most Significant Games, he admits to having come around to the Nintendo Switch and using it frequently on his own time, due to the ease of setting it up and the curated library of indie titles on it.
    • A number of reviews, even he bashes the game, he will sometimes give it credit for doing something well, like in his review of Super Paper Mario, he admits that Chapter 3 was hilarious.
    • He acknowledges that the rank-and-file members of the Hogwarts Legacy dev team were probably just as upset at J.K. Rowling stirring up controversy as many of the potential player base are.
      Yahtzee: ...but dammit, I have a job to do and I feel bad for the no doubt hundreds of ground-level people on the dev team who probably think she's a c-word as much as any of us at this point.
      Exhausted dev sprite: [throttling the monitor] STOP FUCKING TWEETING
  • Play the Game, Skip the Story: Does this quite a lot in-universe, praising a game's gameplay but criticizing its storyline. Examples of this include Batman: Arkham Asylum and Just Cause 2, both of which he named his game of the year for the year in question. Notably he praised the classic mode of Freedom Planet as he hated the story despite liking the gameplay and art design.
  • Portmanteau
    "Essflawcondodgeckindesimudstorliketersockity."
  • Power Trio: With Bob Chipman and James Portnow. Yahtzee is the Id, Bob is the Superego and James is the Ego.
  • Prepare to Die: Used as a Credits Gag.
  • Press X to Not Die: Named it, see Running Gag.
    • Since Batman: Arkham Asylum had none of these, Yahtzee instead used "Press X to KICK ASS."
    • Tom Clancy H.A.W.X.: "Press X To Make The World Safe For Democracy."
    • "Press X to Put Off Going to the Gym" (Luigi's Mansion 2)
    • Ah, Mario can turn into a cat now. Press X to Curl Up And Lick Your Own Balls. (E3 2013)
    • Silent Hill: Origins: "Press X to Nurby Durby Durr" (This particular "Press X" gag is repeated in other videos)
    • Grand Theft Auto IV: "Press X to exaggerate financial standings" (In reference to the game's over-reliance on realism — "What next, the Write-a-letter-to-your-mum mini game?")
      • The hilarious thing is, at one point you do have the option of having Niko write an email to his mother.
    • 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand: "The prerequisite quick-time experiences..." [caption: "Press X To Brutalise This Poor Fellow"] "... are thankfully not mandatory." ["Or Don't, Whatever's Cool."]
    • Mass Effect 2: "Press X To Not Care" ("You can't just spend the whole game knocking back Singapore Slings on a beach all day")
    • Tomb Raider: "Press X to I'm Not Even Going to Fucking Touch This One" (describing the use of a quick-time event in an "attempted rape" scene).
    • At the start of one video, when he mentions the game he's reviewing being a good basis for his psych profile after he starts his inevitable serial murder spree, a forensics team is shown investigating a crime scene with a dead body on the ground and the trope name scrawled on the wall in the victim's blood.
    • In one video, he takes a moment to appear in-person to explain his exact opinions on Quick Time Events in more detail, during which a prompt appears on-screen telling the viewer to Press X. Shortly after it appears, something flies at Yahtzee's head which he then dodges (as would presumably happen if this were a video game cutscene and you successfully pressed X).
  • Pretender Diss: In his review of Let It Die: "But I know my Dark Souls and you, sir, are no Dark Souls!
  • Pretentious Latin Motto: The Credits Gag for Ryse: Son of Rome suggests that Yahtzee's should be "Audacter calumniare, semper aliquid haeret"; this is a Francis Bacon quote meaning "Slander boldly, something always sticks".
  • The Problem with Licensed Games: He actually explains a couple of the reasons why licensed games tend to do poorly while reviewing Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, released to promote the Sands of Time movie, citing that most of them put too much focus on the story or license (as opposed to gameplay) or get rushed enough to where notable issues don't get fixed (both of which, he says, are evidently the case with the 2010 Prince of Persia games). He still finds the game enjoyable despite having the look and feel of a licensed game.
  • Product Placement: Branston Pickle or GAME TRADERS ROBINA.
    "Your one stop shop for games and the trading thereof...in Robina."
  • Promoted Fanboy: Discussed in-universe (for lack of a better term) several times, most notably in the Tales of Monkey Island review. Yahtzee actually takes a generally negative view of this, as he feels that fans-turned-writers tend to be too reverent of the source material, resistant to evolving the work in favour of celebrating the parts they like.
  • Propeller Hat of Whimsy: Children are often portrayed as characters wearing propeller hats.
  • Public Domain Soundtrack: In the "Top 5 of 2010" episode, Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" plays in the background of the Top 5 games list, while Henry Purcell's "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary" plays in the background of the Bottom 5 games list.
  • Pull a Rabbit out of My Hat: The best games of 2019 are pulled out of a magician's hat, while the blandest games of 2019 are pulled out of a cardboard box and the worst games of 2019 are pulled out of a rusty soup can.
  • Pun: On occasion, not just of the visual variety:
    "You only get to see like one second of bare arse anyway so it's hardly going to make your mass erect" ... immediately followed in the credits with: "Yeah, this whole review was leading up to that horrible pun at the end."
    • In the Red Faction: Guerrilla review, he says in the end that game could have went pretty well if it really was based off sneaky guerilla warfare, as opposed to its focus on smashing stuff "... which is less guerilla and more chimpanzee." Followed by the credits gag "Spent ten years thinking up that last pun."
    • "...Balder's Gait." (Too Human)
    • "Fallout 3, that is!"
    • "Fallout 4-llout.
    • The Just Cause 2 review starts by lampshading this to allow him to make "Why? Just 'cause!" jokes "ironically".
      • It's then subverted the third time with "Why? Fucked if I know!"
    • "Bits of it were so boring that I almost had a NieR-death experience! Boosh!"
    • "I don't see Alice: Madness Returns making mad returns, meheh myeh."
    • In his review of Monster Hunter Tri "You play an adventurer-type showing up at the prerequisite village of immobile retards in a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth to try to be a hunter of monsters. A Monster Hunter Try, if you will."
    • Not to mention his credits pun in Alien vs. Predator: "Alias vs Editor".
    • "You like numbers? How about FOUR, as in FOUR-K YOU!"
    • In the credits of Star Wars: The Old Republic: "I'm so force sensitive I clean my swimming pool with midichlorine."
    • In Sniper Elite V2 he calls it at one point Sniper Elite Wee Poo, then chuckles at it.
    • Inevitably scattered everywhere in his review of Risen 3 Titan Lords, but the crowning came in his closing joke:
    It's too dull to get irate about. Or should I say P-irate. Ha haha haha, hahahaha!
    • His Splatoon review has "Still I th-ink there'll be an ink-rease in the number of Wii U sales with this ink-redible new title! God knows why it keeps making ink puns, though, when everyone's very clearly throwing paint around, but that's hardly a complaint. Com-paint."
  • Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
    • Regarding Darius of Red Faction; "Not to dampen your sense of victory, Darius, mate, but why didn't you [fix the terraforming machine] three years ago right after it broke? You DUMB [dopeslap] BALD [dopeslap] TWAT."
    • Also when criticising My Friend Pedro for "ironically" having a sewer level, while simultaneously smacking it with a rolled-up newspaper: "If! Ya know! It's bad! Why? Are ya? Doing it?!"
  • Puppeteer Parasite: Derisively refers to the protagonist of Dead Cells as "a lump of snot on a corpse." Said bogey is in fact a gelatinous parasite driving around a dead body.

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