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"This isn't a review of [video game], it's a review of what it's like to live with someone who plays [video game]."

So one day a young woman called Shelby got tired of her boyfriend Matt playing so much Red Dead Redemption 2 that it affected his IRL behavior, so she made a Youtube channel for the express purpose of complaining about her boyfriend's video game-related behavior. And thus Girlfriend Reviews was born, in which she didn't review the games as much as the experience of watching her boyfriend play the games. However, since then the channel has arguably evolved into a legitimate review show.

Occasionally she would play the games themselves but only if she's actually good enough at them to finish them.

The channel can be found here.


This isn't a list of tropes, it's a list of what it's like to live with the tropes:

  • Action Girl: Shelby has admitted that she's generally bad at modern AAA titles to the point of comparing the gameplay mechanics of The Witcher III with watching the Matrix code. One notable exception however is First-Person Shooters (on PC, not consoles) which means she's good at Doom.
  • Amazon Chaser: According to Shelby, her boyfriend became more in love with her after seeing her be good at Doom.
  • Bait-and-Switch Comment: Exemplified in Shelby's Mad Libs Catchphrase and used as a Running Gag in most reviews.
    • A particularly good one from the review of Yakuza Zero.
    My boyfriend would never spend his money on a bowling game, or a pool game, or HE BETTER NOT BE SPENDING MONEY ON PHONE SEX, or a fishing game, but put those games in another game with a rich narrative about organized crime, and it's all he'll want to do.
  • Catchphrase:
    • "Hol' Up A Minute!"
    • "This isn't a review of X, this is a review of what it's like to live with someone who plays X."
  • Broke the Rating Scale: In Shelby's "bachelorette party" video, where she ranks video game characters by hotness, one of the options is the entire cast of Hades, which demands her to make a new tier atop of all others called "God-like" where she puts them.
  • Character Development: Shelby herself recognized she wasn't really knowledgeable enough in video games to pass proper judgement on things at the start. When the channel made a second review looking back in Red Dead Redemption 2, Shelby admits that her praise of the game's plot being on the level of a good TV show wasn't enough considering the crappy plots she has seen in games since then. She also takes back her problem with RE2 being too campy after having seen the Resident Evil franchise at its campiest with RE4.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: Shelby launches into several during her playthrough of Monster Hunter: Rise. Many commenters say that through this, she has finally become a true gamer.
  • Critical Dissonance: invoked Discussed in the episode on Days Gone, which got So Okay, It's Average reviews from critics but glowing ones from fans, which Shelby felt was motivated by the grievances of reactionary male gamers, especially with the launch of the PC version a year after the polarizing The Last of Us Part II. (Regarding the game itself, she felt that, if anything, the critics went too easy on it, and that it suffered from severe Pacing Problems, cringeworthy writing, and way too many of the coolest moments happening in cutscenes.)
  • A Degree in Useless: Shelby mocks philosophy majors as inevitably getting average jobs unrelated to their field in the review of NieR: Automata.
  • Food as Bribe: Parodied in the E3 2019 review. Shelby gives frivolous recommendations to games showcased in E3 2019 based on how much the devs bribed her and Matt with drinks and merch.
  • Heterosexual Life-Partners: Shelby and Illymation, even to the point of lampshading it with a parody of that scene from ''Step Brothers."
  • I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: Averted in Living With a Lord of the Rings Nerd: Matt ignores Shelby in favour of his Lord of the Rings collection.
    Shelby: A power beyond any boobs is corrupting his mind.
  • In Love with Your Carnage: Shelby's boyfriend proposed while she was slaughtering demons in Doom (2016).
  • Insistent Terminology:
    • Horror games are "spookers", according to Shelby.
    • Similarly, third-person shooters are "look-at-the-booty-shooties".
    • Open-world action adventure games are the... [deep breath]... “open world, stealth archer, somersault, stab, loot and craft, detective mode, tower climb to reveal map and then get side quest fatigue” genre.
  • Lost in Character: According to Shelby, Matt started talking so much like a cowboy as a result of playing Red Dead Redemption II.
  • Mad Libs Catchphrase: The above quote.
  • Medal of Dishonor: Awards the graphics of Fallout 76, "A+... for really bad."invoked
  • Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Shelby's opinion of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. It does just the bare minimum to be considered a decent game, which consists of mostly ripping off other IP's mechanics and gameplay and incorporate in a Star Wars setting. She says that the game is mediocre, but is still the best Star Wars game to come out in years, and that is probably the reason everyone is praising it so much. It's only really good when compared to the other games in the same franchise in recent years.
  • Official Couple: Matt and Shelby of course run the channel together. The couple got married in 2023, leading to many jokes that the channel should be renamed "Wife Reviews".
  • Out-of-Genre Experience: "Understanding The Last of Us Part II" is not a meme-filled review of the game, but a rather serious video essay where Shelby analyzes the plot points and plot structure of the game. The channel felt the need to do so due to how heated the debate about the game was. They would subsequently make their usual comedy review of the game.
  • Railroading: Apparently Matt dislikes games forcing the player to do cruel things — case in point, Red Dead Redemption 2, where the protagonist is friends with outlaws who often kill people. No Robin Hood-style heroics here.
  • Really 700 Years Old: Believes that Keanu Reeves is immortal and has lived for centuries in her E3 2019 review.
  • Running Gag:
  • Sensory Abuse: This is Shelby's reoccurring issue with Dead Cells and Astral Chain. Both games fill the screen with so many particle effects during combat that it makes it too much of a mess for her to enjoy watching. She refers to this phenomenon as "diarrhea Christmas lights".
  • She Who Must Not Be Seen: Shelby and Matt went one year from starting the channel to showing their faces: one still picture on social media, and a few seconds of video. Before that, Matt made a couple of appearances wearing a mask.
  • So Bad, It's Good: invoked Meta example.
    • Shelby freely admits that she loves games with glitchy graphics, because they are more fun to watch.
    • She also loved Heavy Rain for this reason, saying that, between the clunky controls, the terrible writing, and David Cage's habit of making so many of his female characters into sex objects who get violently assaulted, she was crying from laughter the first time she played it.
  • Song Parody: Occasionally reviews would end with one of those.
  • Spectacle: She believes that this is the only reason why Heavy Rain was praised the way it was at launch, arguing that its invoked gorgeous (for the time) graphics and cinematic flair masked its awful gameplay and writing for a lot of critics and Play Station 3 owners.
  • Video Game Movies Suck: invoked Discussed in "Why are video game movies so poo poo?". Shelby notes the irony of it, given that the entire basis of the channel is that many video games are quite watchable even if you're not playing, so it stands to reason that a film adaptation shouldn't be that difficult to pull off. She excoriates Monster Hunter (2020) and the Resident Evil Film Series in particular, though she admits that she liked Mortal Kombat: The Movie for how it faithfully stuck to the games' fighting tournament plot, even if all of those films were directed by the same guy, Paul W.S. Anderson.
  • Yiddish as a Second Language: Shelby named her Animal Crossing village 'Tuchus Town', and peppered in some Hebrew in one of her Monster Hunter: Rise rants.

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