Funny / Fully Ramblomatic

It's a continuation of Yahtzee's classic reviewing style honed over 16 years, so naturally we're going to have some funny moments.

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Fully Ramblomatic

2023 Episodes

Alan Wake II

• Yahtzee argues that even if he tends to like Remedy Entertainment's games on the whole, their plots often plays around with metafiction elements and therefore tend to be kind of up their own ass, and Alan Wake II is perhaps the crowning example of this.
  Yahtzee: I mean any work of fiction about a work of fiction with the power to reshape the fabric of reality is sort of inherent up itself, and that is before we get to the fact that Sam Lake, the director and writer of the game, casts himself in it as three different characters. Which takes us so up ourselves that we can start speedbagging our own uvula.
  Alan Wake II: Not three different characters, Yahtz! They're arguably three different aspects of the same character.
  Yahtzee: Uh huh. Well, that's just slid us another six or seven inches up ourselves, hasn't it? Now our hands are sticking out of our mouth and gesturing to see the wine menu.
• At the end of the review, Yahtzee addresses the viewers directly, thanking them for their support in this transitional period while sitting down with his dog and smoking the severed leg of an infant like a fine cuban cigar to make a point about the kind of shit he's allowed to do now that he's part of an independently-funded co-op.
  Yahtzee: Don't worry, I'm not going to have an impassioned talk like this every week. I think next time, we'll go back to the smash cutting to the overly loud credits music right after the final gag. It's just cause this is the first. Don't want anyone to think I'm getting sincere all of a sudden. And furthermore, "bum, balls, wankity wank, labia, flatulent, gush."
  • The transition from the review into this uncharacteristically sincere moment is itself hilarious:
    Yahtzee: There are certainly moments that may provoke an eye roll or two, but there's nothing inherently wrong with being up yourself. It's just another word for auteur, isn't it? And it's a good way to check for prostate cancer. (Beat) But, you know, talking about prostate cancer makes me think about how ephemeral life is...

Robocop: Rogue City

• Yahtzee's opening mini-rant about gaming culture's habit of giving various genres fairly unintuitive names, which transitions into him discussing the uncharacteristically apropos "movement shooter"... and lamenting how he's gotten sick of them as of late.
  Yahtzee: Fun though it was when Doom (2016) kicked off the nostalgia wave for 90's-style shooters, there's currently enough of them on Steam to clog a baleen whale's dentures. But the cultural vogue is constantly adapting, and that's presumably why with RoboCop: Rogue City developers Teyon are pioneering a new interesting counterpoint to the movement shooter. Namely, the "Plod Around Like You've Got Tea Trays Strapped To Each Foot And Two Pounds Of Rapidly Cooling Shit Threatening To Leak Out The Legs Of Your Underpants"-Shooter. Or to use its original name, Gears of War.
• Yahtzee's description of the game's plot where the gangs of Detroit are causing mayhem to each impress "The New Guy In Town", comparing it to a bunch of kids trying to get a cool kid's attention in hopes that they'll eat at their cafeteria table and be their best friend.
  Yahtzee: Maybe they're doing a The Bachelor-style reality TV show for crime lords, because when we meet the dude, he kinda seems like just a random prick who enjoyed Alan Rickman's performance in the movie Die Hard so much he modelled his fucking life on it.
• "...interspersed with trips to the police station where we can either go straight to the next actually-fun part of the game, or pause for some suffocatingly pointless sidequest where RoboCop goes around getting everyone to sign a 'Get Well Soon' card, and that's not the facetious exaggerated example it sounds like."

The Talos Principle 2

• Yahtzee starts the review up ready to sing praises of The Talos Principle 2 for being "exactly the kind of thing a sequel should be"... namely by having a simple numerical sequel title!
  Yahtzee: None of this Talos Principle Chronicles or Talos Principle: The Next Generation twattery! [...] I would say it's important to have played the first game to fully grasp the plot, but thankfully, Croteam made it easy to deduce the intended order. "Does it have 2 at the end of it? No? Well then play that one first, ya idiot." Old-school! Nice!
• Yahtzee establishing that both this game and its predecessor have are verbose, to say the least.
  Game: Do you want us to explain it to you, Yahtz?
  Yahtzee: That's okay, Talos Principle 1.
  Game: It's no trouble, we wrote like 900 in-universe text logs explaining the philosophical link between sentience and filling the backs of cereal boxes!
  Yahtzee: I'm sure you did, Talos Principle 1! I don't have time to read them now; could you pop them in my novelty inbox that's designed to look like a dustbin?

Persona 5 Tactica & American Arcadia

• Yahtzee suffering the same fate of every Persona fan of getting increasingly impatient for the next numbered entry in the series.
  Yahtzee: So Persona 5 Tactica represents Atlus' latest effort to hedge on finally committing to a fucking Persona 6 for Christ's sake, and I must say, officially marks the point that I got kinda sick of Persona 5 spinoffs. Which is remarkable in itself, 'cause the fucking dancing game couldn't manage that!
• Yahtzee describes the Phantom Thieves as "simultaneously the world's most extraneously large heist crew and the world's smallest cosplay convention."
• In going over the watered-down-ness of Tactica, Yahtzee tries to figure out what the game still has in store for him as a Persona fan: the Dual-World Gameplay? The game is mostly linear with only extraneous breaks in between for cutscenes. The stylish menu design? The actual organization of the menus are significantly worse. The really good music?
  Yahtzee: ...yeah, alright, you can have a tick there. Persona 5 Tactica is permitted to exist as long as I can't be asked to buy the soundtrack album.
• After waffling over whether he actually liked American Arcadia or not, Yahtzee settled on a thumbs-up due to how well it stuck the landing with its ending, remarking how "it just goes to show just how important a good ending can be in the grand scheme of things, as I said in my Yelp review for my local Asian massage parlour." This is accompanied by an image of Yahtzee on a massage bed as he's approached by an employee holding a vacuum pump.
  "HAVE WE GONE OVER OUR DELUXE PACKAGE"

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

• Yahtzee expresses confusion that Avatar has become a global juggernaut, given that neither he nor anyone he knows has ever expressed any interest.
  Yahtzee: Maybe there's an unknown subsection of humanity living among us, presumably dwelling underground and subsisting on rats and stray dogs, who emerge from the sewer drains at night to watch Avatar movies and send votes into America's Next Top Model.
  Sewer Person: [into phone] Lurrr-tisssh-aaa...
  Yahtzee: Or maybe James Cameron is buying up millions of empty theater seats to pad his numbers when he's not buggering off to the bottom of the ocean to scrape bits of dead billionaire off the Titanic.
• Yahtzee eventually gives up interest in the game, but not without a parting shot at the Na'Vi.
  Yahtzee: [...] and the story failed to make me give a single cerulean skidmark for these interchangeable blue one-with-naturey-than-thou dullards and their bullshit problems. "Oh no, we're being victimized by the little smelly fragile people who haven't had their every need and want in life fucking handed to them by their enviroment. Suppose we'd better kill them all and get back to our difficult life of parties and finger-painting. Oh, what a bore!" Why don't you stick a branch up your arse and complain about it on tree Reddit!
• "I wanna know when James Cameron's gonna make the crossover between Titanic and Piranha 2: The Spawning".

The Best, Worst and Blandest of 2023

• Yahtzee compares his awards show to The Game Awards:
  Yahtzee: [...] except for two crucial details; one, we prioritize awarding things and not sucking off corporate industry so hard that its legs recede into its stomach cavity, and two, our award categories actually fucking mean something. I mean, come on, "Best Action Adventure"? Might as well have an award for "Best Game With A Title Screen".
• The reasoning for picking Amnesia: The Bunker as 4th Best.
  Yahtzee: I'm still one of those deviants who likes horror games in months other than October, and it would be remiss of me not to award the one game that actually scared the piss out of my jaded arse. Please don't ask what piss was doing in my arse.
  Yahtzee's avatar: (while mopping up said piss) My doctor says we'll keep an eye on it.
• "Boy, the conversation around Hogwarts Legacy really helped me appreciate new perspectives and expand my worldview. Now I know how the mute function works on Twitter!"
  • Earlier in the episode, Yahtzee is asked, "Are you gonna call her a cunt?", a Take That! to the YouTube censorship of the word while his Zero Punctuation videos were still on The Escapist and Gamurs who didn't want them demonetized on YouTube.

2024 Episodes

Beyond Good and Evil

• While describing his means to "refresh [his] memory" on Beyond Good & Evil by playing the Steam re-release, we get a visual of Yahtzee sloshing a bottle of Sprite in his ear and presumably into his brain, which also happens to be the moment where the background color transitions to green.
• Yahtzee notes that the pseudo-cartoony art style of the game has aged surprisingly well after over 20 years, "as long as you don't pay too much attention to the facial animation and notice that the protagonist blankly frowns her way through every cutscene like she stopped listening 5 minutes ago and is annoyed that she still got The Magic Roundabout theme tune stuck in her head."
• "Said protagonist is Jade, a spunky young photographer/reporter/adventurer/assassin/orphanage operator with a passion for justice and way too many fucking jobs."
• Yahtzee periodically mentions that some of the voice acting is a bit too enthusiastic, represented in one instance with giving the hedgehog he's using to represent the animal folk of the game intense bug-eyes.
  Yahtzee: ...and the race missions make the most out of [the hovercraft], even if the announcer deliriously screaming all his lines makes me feel uncomfortably like I'm riding Bay Area public transport...
  Megaphone: AAAAAAAAAAAAAA THEY'RE IN MY TEETH
• Describing the feeling of driving a hovercraft around as being "as fundamentally smooth and entertaining as pushing a disembodied tit around an air hockey table," complete with a censored (but visibly bloody) visual recreation.
  Toffee: The police are here.
  Yahtzee: STALL THEM.
• When concluding the review by discussing the perpetual hype towards the still-struggling-in-Development Hell sequel, Yahtzee fesses that it's probably best that we move on for the sake of our impossibly high expectations.
  Yahtzee: Let's just say something is Beyond Good and Evil 2. "Horizon Zero Dawn, there you go. You're Beyond Good and Evil 2. And Kena: Bridge of Spirits, you're Beyond Good and Evil 3." Christ, this is easy! It's like the end of Spartacus with slightly more masculine trousers!"
  Immortals Fenyx Rising (while wearing pteruges): *I* am Beyond Good and Evil 2!

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

• "...the only thing that connects Lost Crown's protagonist to established Princes of Persia is that they live in Persia and they're a hunky boy with a posh accent who runs around with no shirt— (starts sweating and tugging at his collar) ...alright, consider me on board."

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

• Due to not being able to use the exact same designs as characters that were previously shown in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee opted for new looks for the characters of Like a Dragon: Ichiban Kasuga gets the head of Eric André with googly eyes, while Kazuma Kiryu has a brick for a head with much angrier googly eyes.
• Yahtzee illustrates how Yakuza/Like A Dragon's tone has always been bonkers, where it "shows us ultra-gritty violent torture scenes in which a dude shoots off another dude's fingers, or crucifies a dude to a wall and eviscerates him, and then two seconds later, we confront the one responsible by whacking him with a surfboard so he flies into the path of our hula dancer party member's flying buttock strike." Later in the review, Yahtzee clarifies that "hula dancer" is indeed a character class in the game.
• "Oh, this is where you buy weapons for chefs, prostitutes, and supply teachers, which you won't be able to use for another five hundred story missions, and everything costs fifteen thousand bucks anyway. If I wanted to be teased this much, I'd use the glory-hole in the toilets at the dementia hospital."
• "On that front, we have an entire cocking Pokémon knockoff — gosh, it's a good time for those at the moment, apparently, isn't it?"
  Yahtzee: ...in which we recruit and battle small groups of creepy men. Alongside it, but not interacting with it, we also have a full-on Pokémon Snap knockoff in which we must take pictures of a similar, but distinct cadre of creepy men. I'm noticing a theme emerging here, Like a Dragon; someone's been spending too much time on public transport.
  • During the credits, one of the ending comments reads "Mind you the Pokémon anime gets a lot funnier if you imagine all the Pokémon replaced with creepy men."
• Yahtzee summarizes Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth as decent, but questionably-paced and disappointingly same-y, comparing it to spending an afternoon with a doddery, elderly relative.
  Yahtzee: Hey, shall we go unlock the job system, Like a Dragon?
  Like a Dragon: (slowly) Now, 'old your 'orses! Let's make sure everything's nice and tidy first. Ooh, look at all these pictures of creepy men I've taken! What were we talking about?
  Yahtzee: Job system, Like a Dragon?
  Like a Dragon: Oh, I remember, I remember! I'm not that far-gone. Let's stop getting distracted. Ooh, how long's this glory-hole been here?

Graven

• "...so here comes Graven to fill the niche, named after how a road accident victim with a speech impediment might describe the drab-colored commercial vehicle that hit him^note A "grey van"... Yeah, sorry, that's the best I've got."
• Yahtzee describes the drab and confusing level design as "trying to figure out where in John Romero's forsaken haircare regimen I was supposed to go next," complete with an image of the player character trying to walk through the long hair of a tinted-green Romero.

Persona 3: Reload

• Yahtzee makes it clear that he's getting pretty sick of the wait for Persona 6, and the seemingly endless flood of spinoffs released in the meantime - so much so, that Atlus has to Bait-and-Switch him to get Persona 3 Reload in the door, promising an actual mainline installment "with a number on the end that isn't five and is a multiple of three!"
  Atlus: Hey, we've made a new Persona ga— OW! Why'd you slam the door in my face?
• Yahtzee remarking how Persona games tend to have very similar casts of player characters with the same archetypes: "the slacker idiot best friend who inevitably takes the lead in perving operations", "the serious boy", "the posh girl", "the smart girl", and "the... girl, girl". Yahtzee then remarks how Persona 3 breaks from the formula (for better and for worse) with "the ten-year old", "the dog", and "the mechanical sex doll".
  Yahtzee: ...none of them are introduced with what I'd consider the necessary degree of ceremony. Your party's just like "Oh okay, a sentient robot waifu, that's a perfectly acceptable thing to see in a contemporary setting, welcome to the team! Please add your name to the perving roster!"
• The dissonance of Persona 3's morose and morbid tone mixed with Persona 5's flashy and stylish presentation is not lost on Yahtzee:
  Yahtzee: Every now and again, I'd wake from a repetitive dungeon-induced trance and reflect on how weird it would seem out of context, when the funky fight music kicks in and everything bops along to it for a few moments before our dude casually but determinedly beans himself in the skull. It's like an extremely ill-advised premise for a Saturday morning cartoon: "Okay gang, let's summon Captain Planet by all putting our heads in this magic noose."
  • "I'm just pulling your plonker, Persona 3: Reload. Part of me likes that you're a bit scatterbrained! ...if that's not an unfortunate choice of words."
  • Capped off with the Credits Gag:
    What next, a story about getting transported to a wonderful land of fantasy because you jumped in front of a bus - oh wait
• Yahtzee's defense of preserving the Early-Installment Weirdness of a series goes into a very unexpectedly pitch-black turn (seemingly capping off his Running Gag of Persona being a series about perving on girls):
  Yahtzee: There's a unique value to watching the process by which a concept finds its groove. It's like the beauty of seeing a tree grow from a seed, or a blooming flower of girlhood expand to fill out her training bra, or a vibrant purple bruise slowly spreading out from your eye socket after the blooming flower of girlhood's dad shows up.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

• The title of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League naturally invites the return of Yahtzee's alternate titling of the game he's reviewing, including "Suicide Squad: Kill Rocksteady's Marketability", "Suicide Squad: Kill Your Darlings", and "Suicide Squad: Kill Me and End My Disease of a Life, You Remorseless Bastards".
• Yahtzee notes this is the first time in a while since he got the chance to review a big-budget game that virtually everyone on the internet agreed was crap, the last one of note being Forspoken:
  Yahtzee: ...which, now I'm thinking about it, came out at more or less this exact same time. I guess this is an annual thing now: Fuck You February.
• Summarizing the titular squad:
  • Floyd "Deadshot" Walten
  • Harleen "Harley 'They Came Up With My Real Name Five Minutes Before Lunch Break' Quinn" Quinzel
  • Digger "Captain 'Why the Fuck Am I Even on This Team When It Already Has a Ranged Weapons Guy Who Isn't Cripplingly Overspecialized?' Boomerang" Harkness
  • ...and King Shark.
• Yahtzee's only defense for why Rocksteady made such an awful looter-shooter after establishing themselves as groundbreakers in single-player epics is that they were being pushed to do so by Warner Bros., and thus churned out the worst example possible in order to convince them to go back to what they're best at. Unfortunately, Yahtz has no defense for them completely destroying the Arkham universe's credibility in the process:
  Yahtzee: "Whoops! The looter shooter you forced us to make sucks balls! Oh well; guess it's back to the world-class groundbreaking single-player games with us!" But it's those you just shat all over, Rocksteady; there's no sucking that back into your bumhole. Believe me, I've tried; that's why they banned me from the soft play area.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden

• Yahtzee passive-aggressively highlighting the blatant missed opportunity regarding the setting of the game:
  Yahtzee: It's set in a Puritan settlement in 17th-century New England; bearing that in mind, what specific variety of standard Halloween monster do you think we'll be mostly concerned with? Think carefully. What kind of supernatural entities are 17th-century Puritans famous for overzealously hunting, in the sort of hunts certain former presidents have a tendency to ceaselessly bang on about? That's right: Ghosts. [...] What, were you expecting witches? Hahaha! Don't be silly! There aren't any witches in Banishers (HRUUH) Ghosts of New Eden, except for several. Oh, and some of the ghosts are ghosts of witches, but come on; it's 17th-century New England. A few of them were going to be anyway, that's just statistics.
• Yahtzee establishes the intended stakes of the game's story — the protagonists are already in a relationship before the events of the game, one of them is killed and rendered a ghost, and the story grapples between whether we should exorcise her and allow her to pass on, or attempt a forbidden ritual with human sacrifice in an attempt to resurrect her — before explaining the simple reasons why it doesn't work, including that neither of the characters are interesting.
  Yahtzee: The screen isn't exactly aglow with white-hot passion — Antea mostly treats Red with the sort of loving condescension one extends to a German shepherd, and Red is a bearded, aggressively Scottish dude in a tartan kilt stopping just short of drying his tears on a set of bagpipes, and I feel like he's a big enough boy to get by on his own now. Thinking about it, the choice would've been much harder if Red had been a German shepherd; all he'd have to do is look at her body and then to camera with a big, soppy look on his face, and I, for one, would probably have to reassess the "murder a bunch of dudes" proposal. Ooh, a German shepherd wearing a little tam 'o shanter? Fuck, I'd start killing people before he did the face!
• The flimsiness of the moral choices the game is trying to frame as profound finally gets to Yahtzee's nerves regarding the decision to either absolve or murder various "hauntees", where it's clear that the game has a Karma Meter that decides the ending, resulting in him having to do the "correct" choices against his better judgement.
  Yahtzee: ...so sometimes, the hauntee actually deserves to get brain-sploded, and I'll have to absolve them anyway, 'cos I'm not stupid; there's never any benefit to flip-flopping. I know; I played both inFAMOUS games and the shitty one!

Skull and Bones

• Yahtzee begins the review acknowledging that he's been picking on Ubisoft a lot lately, but he can't help it, especially when they make themselves incredibly easy targets by declaring Skull & Bones to be a "quadruple-A game".
  Yahtzee: You see, while no one deserves to be bullied, if you march into the school cafeteria, plop down at the table with all the rough lads, and declare, "I'd wager none of you fellows know as much about Naruto as me!", then at that point, you're kind of asking for it, especially when it turns out you don't actually know that much about Naruto.
  Ubisoft: (lying on the ground with a lunch-tray jammed in its ass) B-but I watched all of season 1 and 2!
• "...after ten long years to improve on the idea, Skull and Bones has less gameplay, less story, less sandbox, and Les Misérables."
  Yahtzee: So let's stock our ship at the island of Lesbos and get into it!
• After mentioning the weirdly high number of characters giving your no-name player character boons right off the bat from "that look in your eye"...
  Yahtzee: Man, what is it with our eyes?! Who are we, The Demon Headmaster? Yes, I do get off on making references most people won't get.
• Yahtzee describing his experience with the hub world where you can see the avatars of other online players. Upon realizing that virtually all of them decided to wear the same things (tricorn hat, eyepatch, overcoat), he chose to trade his gear up for "a colorful stripy shirt, shorts, and a silly red hat", describing himself as looking like Ness from EarthBound.
• "The core gameplay is just ships: ship movement and ship combat. If you want epic swordfights while drenched in pitiless spray, you're going to have to go back to taking showers with your brothers."
  Yahtzee: Ship movement consists of pointing to where you want to go and waiting, waiting a little bit less if you have stamina, and more when you've run out. Hold up, question from the floor, Skull and Bones: why does my ship have a Sprint Meter? And why is it restored with food items?! What, we climbing down to the figurehead and shoving pancakes in its mouth?

Pacific Drive

• Yahtzee quickly establishes that he enjoys Pacific Drive's creative driving-based gameplay as driving gives him one of his few remaining senses of freedom since becoming a father — especially the parts where it gets extremely trippy.
  Yahtzee: ...it reminds me of that part of driving where reality starts melting around you and you have to put your foot down to escape the bouncing robot hedgehog things, which is my other favorite part, but my wife always has to be a buzzkill and grab the wheel and nag me to get my narcolepsy looked at.
• "So... this is a game that's going to be tough to explain."
  Yahtzee: You're a dude driving a car.
  Guy: Hmm... Well, Yahtz—
  Yahtzee: That wasn't the tough-to-explain part; I'm still figuring it out!
• "Gameplay's primarily purpose-produced for podcast patronage, and about as post-dad as post-dad gets, combining the three dominant components of the dad psyche: driving around, engine maintenance, and packing the shopping. Oh, and nuclear disasters."
• Yahtzee summarizes the gameplay as being surprisingly easy in retrospect, but not caring since the gameplay loops are solid and the escape moments where you're trying to Race Against the Clock (despite being more generous than they appear) are nevertheless genuinely thrilling. He caps this off with a caption in the credits:
  Plus the escape sequences are great for practicing getting out of the Costco parking lot at 2 PM on a Saturday.

Alone in the Dark

• Yahtzee notices that the Tommy Gun is kind of a Game-Breaker in regards to combat, but is also basically obligatory for the setting.
  Yahtzee: The Tommy Gun is to Depression-Era setting what Harley Quinn is to any DC Universe property. People will complain if you don't put it in.
• After failing to be impressed by the horror elements, and the stealth and combat gameplay, Yahtzee asks if the game has anything else for him:
  Alone in the Dark: Do ya like puzzles, Yahtz?
  Yahtzee: Sure do!
  Alone in the Dark: Do you like jigsaw puzzles with a maximum of nine pieces?
  Yahtzee: Oh, yes! They keep my four-year-old occupied while I do grown-up things like crosswords and rewiring electronics. I don't suppose you've got anything like that?
  Alone in the Dark: Uh, no... It's mostly baby-jigsaws. But you have to rotate the pieces sometimes!
• In his closing comment, Yahtzee says he just couldn't get in sync with the characters, "and not just because I've never worn a trilby or unironically addressed a woman as 'dame'." Cue Toffee running up to Yahtzee with the Zero Punctuation hat in his mouth and presenting it to him.
  Yahtzee: ...What? That's a fedora!

Dragon's Dogma 2

• "Sometimes, I lick the underbellies of sugar gliders for an illicit sexual thrill. (beat) See? First impressions do matter!"
  Yahtzee: And first impressions of Dragon's Dogma II weren't great, 'cos it's only got one save slot. One. Of all the trillions of numbers that exist, they picked the very worst.
  • Yahtzee relays that he had to go "Steam folder spelunking" to find delete his editor's cloud save file from his hard drive in order to sidestep the "one save file" issue, before saying aloud "This is a literary device we call 'foreshadowing'."
  • The payoff hits at the end of the review where after dealing with a particularly nasty difficulty spike, he realized every time he tried to do a manual reload from his save, his maximum health was being sliced down, forcing him to instead try the "Last Inn Rest" option... which spawned him somewhere "four or five hours ago," leading to a horrifying realization.
    Yahtzee: ...Oh no. Oh, no, no no no no no don't you fucking autosave, you single-save-slotted slattern, FUCK! I took a moment then, staring at my character's twitching buttocks, contemplating the afternoon I'd just had stolen from me, and eventually reached my conclusion: Suck a dick, Dragon's Dogma 2! You weren't much fun, and you've got all the personality of a wooden cutting board in unflattering underpants, so inhale the nearest convenient phallus to hand! Gosh, that's always liberating to say, especially when you know you can spend the rest of the work week breaking in your new inflatable sex doll! (to the camera) Which you'll be interested to hear, Capcom, has three slots!
• Just like the first game, Yahtzee takes issue with the Pawns' irritating tendency to communicate in "patently bloody obvious" statements.
  Pawn: You are running low on backpack space. Having backpack space means you can carry more things. You are striking me about the head and face with a blunt object. This will ensure I sustain severe brain damage. Truly the wisdom of the Arisen knows no slib blurble glop.
  Yahtzee: Except imagine all of this with every other word replaced with "aught" as a sort of cheat sheet Mad-Lib version of Shakespearean dialect.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

• According to Yahtzee, the party of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth consists of Cloud Strife, Mr. T, Manic Pixie Dream Girl A, Mr. T's dog, Manic Pixie Dream Girl B, and later Manic Pixie Dream Girl C.
• In discussing how this section of Final Fantasy VII's plot that Rebirth covers mostly consists of "pissing about" (describing it and its many hours of gameplay as what can be summarized in a single paragraph of the Wikipedia article of VII's story), Yahtzee makes note of a story beat where the party tries to track down Sephiroth at a luxury cruise, a beach resort, and a theme park, each time with the various female party members going "Oh hey, well, since we're here..."
  Yahtzee: Yeah, good hustle, girls, I've tried that one a few times. "No, really, this vat of ice cream is totally a business expense, Nick! It's research for the next time I review a Kirby game!"
• Yahtzee documents the various tone problems that come with adapting the sillier elements of VII for a modern audience, describing a genuinely well-told and emotional subplot where Barret has to put his old comrade out of his madness-induced misery, which the game concludes when "a fucking circus strongman in a cape and little red pants shows up in a monster truck and attempts to alleviate Barret's grief by strategically flexing at him."^note What's even funnier is that this beat isn't even in the original Final Fantasy VII; it was very much a new addition to Rebirth.
• Yahtzee brings up that Rebirth has open-world elements that sound disconcertingly close to the much-loathed "Jiminy Cockthroat" archetype of unlocking radio towers, climbing up sequences of yellow-painted ledges, and crafting mechanics:
  Yahtzee: [...]try to imagine my face transitioning through one of those "faces of meth" photo sequences as I read those out.
  • "Still, it's only an open-world game in the sense that Nicolas Cage is a good actor: it's only true about half the time."
• "But as the party continued to accrue new members, every time I was forced by contrived story reasons to switch them around to maximize manic pixie efficiency or whatever, I'd make a noise like a frustrated walrus trying to open a ring-pull tuna can, sort of like this: 'NYAAAAAAAOOOOoooooorghgh!'"

South Park: Snow Day!

• Yahtzee's graudually failing enthusiasm at the game trying to do things differently than its predecessors.
  Snow Day!: We're going to completely mix things up by making Snow Day! a full 3D game!
  Yahtzee: Oh.
  Snow Day!: ...With real time combat!
  Yahtzee: Oooh...
  Snow Day!: ...And a focus on co-op multiplayer!
  Yahtzee: Eeeeeeurhohohew...
  Viewer: Yahtzee, stop incrementing random vowels!
  Yahtzee: I can't help it! An established singleplayer franchise suddenly pulling a co-op focused sequel is one of the lead-ups to armageddon in the Book of Revelations! Just between war in the Middle East and the Election of the Anti-Christ!

Semi-Ramblomatic

The Rise and Fall of Video Game Titles

• The video serves as Yahtzee's compiling of various "do's and don'ts" for naming video games. Yahtzee being Yahtzee, he decides to save time at the start by simply focusing on the "don'ts".
• While going over stock subtitles beginning with "Re-", Yahtzee brings up how "The Matrix has a lot to answer for, aside from that terrible, brief window in the early 2000's when trenchcoats were trendy."
• Yahtzee's new term for a specific variant of The X of Y titles, the "Bollock Sandwich": when a game developer aware that "The X of Y" is a tired naming format but isn't creative enough to do away with it tries "fixing" it by inserting in an exotic nonsense word that evokes a faraway land of fantasy "or possibly a piece of IKEA furniture," resulting whitebread title words surrounding distractingly confusing "bollocks" in the middle like Immortals of Aveum, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Immortals Fenyx Rising, and Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem.
  Yahtzee: I could only remember Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem because I have, on three separate occasions, had to dig through my own archives going, "What the fuck was the name of that Diablo knockoff I reviewed a while back? The one with the bald dude on the front with the beard and the pauldrons big enough to shelter a horse?"
• Yahtzee ruminates at the end over the weirdly high number of franchises using the initials "A.C.": Assassin's Creed, Animal Crossing, Armored Core, Assetto Corsa, Asheron's Call, Ace Combat, Astral Chain...
  Yahtzee: What is it about these specific initials that video games find so Automatically Captivating? Is it their Appealing Cadence? The Aesthetic Component? Actual Communists?! Let me Ardently Counsel being Appropriately Cautious of employing such an Aggravating Combination. Alright, Cockheads!

The Importance of a Good Monster Introduction

• While establishing examples of games that have good intros to the first enemy that introduces combat, Yahtzee lampshades his obligatory mention of Silent Hill 2, complete with literally banging a drum.
• As the video closes, he realizes that virtually every positive example he mentioned is from a game he already really likes and mentions all the time, bringing up a full bingo card for "'Yahtzee Mentions' Bingo". The full list:
  • Post-dad game mechanics
  • Deus Ex
  • Game with bullshit semicolon in title
  • Return Of The Obra Dinn
  • David Cage
  • Thief: The Dark Project
  • A Jiminy Cockthroat
  • Peter Molyneux
  • Chie from Persona 4
  • Doom
  • Word games
  • Dark Souls 1
  • QTEs
  • Commodore 64
  • JC Denton shouting "a bomb"
  • Naval combat and/or ships
  • Your Mom
  • Silent Hill 2
  • Detective puzzler mechanics
  • Undertale
  • Loooive service
  • Half-Life
  • Grappling hooks
  • Stardew Valley
• Yahtzee can cite one example of a game that he dislikes that nevertheless does a first enemy introduction well: Wolfenstein: Youngblood, where the main characters kill their first Nazi, celebrate, and then immediately throw up^note They actually don't, though one of them comes close to it upon finding a piece of the Nazi's brain in her mouth. Yahtzee admits to have found this moment pretty funny and humanizing, along with setting the tone of the game: being a load of old sick.
• Yahtzee ends up unsure of how to tie the video up, and so he ends up resorting to the classic YouTuber method: asking for viewers to comment their favorite examples down below.
  Yahtzee: Let us know down below, then look alive and click "Subscribe!" And don't be a hatreon, subscribe to the Patreon!

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