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Anderson in the flesh.note 

Joseph Anderson is a video game critic and writer best known for his lengthy and exhaustive videos analyzing different games on his YouTube channel, starting with Dark Souls in 2015. Since then, he has amassed over three hundred thousand subscribers, with over a million views on videos discussing Fallout 4, the Uncharted series alongside The Last of Us, The Witness, God of War (PS4), Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Prey (2017), No Man's Sky, and The Witcher.

Anderson also streams many of the games he plays on Twitch, with reuploads of these streams later appearing on his second channel. Compared to his mostly serious review content, Anderson's streams are much more laid-back, featuring running gags and memes, chat interaction, guest appearances from his partner and children, and occasional tea drinking.


Joseph Anderson provides examples of:

  • April Fools' Day: He uploaded a 12-minute analysis of Google Chrome's "T-Rex Runner," the game you can play on the browser when you don't have internet. The video plays the analysis entirely straight until the end, where he concludes... that Super Mario Odyssey is a 6/10.
  • Arkham's Razor: In his Hello Neighbor stream, Anderson purposefully tried to break the first puzzle in the game by stacking objects up and climbing through a broken window rather than find a more natural way to get there. Turns out that's actually the solution...
  • Artificial Stupidity: Anderson spent an extensive amount of time during his Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order livestreams to confirm whether or not stormtroopers were programmed to be dumb after seeing them shoot rockets at their own feet, walk into obvious death traps, and more. Despite multiple tests, he never came to a satisfying conclusion if it was really bad A.I. or really good bad A.I.
  • Canada, Eh?: He's Canadian, and not above occasionally exaggerating his accent and using stereotypically Canadian slang for laughs during streams, such as his Until Dawn playthrough.
  • Deadpan Snarker: The most common type of humor across his reviews and livestreams. Jokes can fly past you if you're not paying attention, though they're much more obvious when not scripted.
  • Death of a Child: Joseph is a father of four, and will never hesitate to remind you of that fact every time a game involves the deaths of children, or just depicts them in danger in general, especially infants and toddlers.
  • Easter Egg: The "T-Rex Runner" review is filled with these if you happen to look at what google searches Anderson was making to get to the game in the first place. Topics include anime, controversial video game opinions, memes associated with his own videos, and, well... other stuff too.
  • Everyone Has Standards: While he invoked Video Game Cruelty Potential on just about everyone in Persona 4, he was particularly vindictive towards Dojima and Yosuke. This was due to him genuinely and vocally disapproving of their treatment of Nanako and Kanji respectively (the former due to being heavily neglected despite being a small child and the latter due to having his insecurities probed and being the butt of more than a few homophobic retorts).note 
  • Fan Art: Receives a fair share of this during his livestreams, usually depicting Anderson himself as an anthropomorphic dragon exemplifying particularly memorable moments.
  • Funny Animal: Likely due to his YouTube icon being a dragon, depictions of Anderson are usually drawn as one, with red scales and horns. His family is usually drawn as talking dragons as well when depicted in Fan Art.
  • Laughing at Your Own Jokes: Anderson does this frequently within livestreams, usually in a pattern of saying something humorous or ridiculous out of nowhere, trying to quickly move on to the next subject, and then stopping and laughing at it anyway.
  • Pun-Based Title: Fairly common for livestream reuploads on his second channel.
  • Rage Quit: Usually averted, since he tends to keep calm even during difficult sections of games.note  However, he did give up on Hello Neighbor during one of its final sections despite having played for over eight straight hours.
  • Running Gag:
    • After playing through the first case of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, any time where someone is being accused of something (or if a mystery is raised at all) will have Anderson ask: Leon?
    • Subscribers of Anderson's Twitch channel are usually given a long list of purposefully embarrassing invitations, such as welcoming them to the Cringe CafĂ©, the Rub-a-Dub Sub Club, and other more specific ones depending on the situation.
    • Anderson will generally ask if something is "worth a Moon" after completing an easy task, a reference to his infamous review of Super Mario Odyssey where he complained about the abundance of easy to complete and repetitive moons in the game.
    • Any fancy and obtuse text will usually be read in an impersonation of Yusuke's voice from Persona 5.
    • Anderson consistently compares elements of video games to Dark Souls in his reviews and elsewhere with varying accuracy, to the point where it can be difficult to tell when he's joking.
    • When asked a question (initially inspired by multiple viewers asking whether or not he had heard of Disco Elysium), Anderson will instead search up and play audio of the "AYAYA" meme from Kiniro Mosaic, before answering the question honestly as if nothing happened. Of course, he doesn't always do this, keeping viewers on their toes whenever they hear him looking something up...
  • That Makes Me Feel Angry: Anderson's stoic way of speaking can leave viewers confused on how he actually feels about a game, so he sometimes has to state his opinions plainly for clarification.
  • The Teetotaler: Anderson has said he dislikes drinking, and generally only drinks in social situations where it would be awkward not to. However, he does have a tradition to drink a small amount of alcohol with his partner on New Year's Eve.
  • Versus Title: Joseph Anderson Vs No Man's Sky.
  • You Say Tomato: Anderson pronounces "Mario" as "Marry-o" rather than the usual North American pronunciation of "Mar-ee-o" something which many commenters pointed out considering he had to use the word for two hours in his Super Mario Odyssey review.

Tropes discussed by Joseph Anderson:

  • Continuing is Painful: Discussed in his review of Darkest Dungeon, where the game's over-reliance on its Random Number Generator can set the player back hours upon hours of grinding in the event one of their high-level heroes die. It's already taxing enough just raising one character to level 6, but the inability to bring high-level heroes back into easier dungeons to babysit a new recruit, thus forcing the player to train an entirely fresh squad from scratch, only serves to artificially lengthen the (already-tedious) grind, which makes picking up after taking casualties incredibly frustrating and time-consuming. It's one of the primary reasons why he considered Darkest Dungeon to be one of the most miserable gaming experiences he's had, despite its impressive presentation.
  • Flanderization: Discussed during his Persona 4 on the topic of why his opinion of Yosuke soured so greatly. Joe was initially impressed by him subverting many tropes associated with the Best Friend character (among others, Yosuke spent much of the early game being The Smart Guy of the team). As the game progressed, he noted that Yosuke's lecherous attitude and his insensitivity drowned out the aspects of his character that he had praised before.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: His biggest issue with the gaming medium and one he has mentioned in many of his videos. He frequently notes that often times a games story and gameplay don't align when they should, which pulls him out of the experience. In his video "Why Horror Games Don't Scare Me", he explains that he can't get into horror games like he can with movies or books because in a game, if he dies, he knows he can just load his save and do it again, compared to a book or movie where once something happens, nothing can be done to undo it as a viewer. He often argues that perma-death would be a better way of making horror games scarier because then your death is final.
  • Good Bad Bug:invoked He's given this a name; "Bethesda's Bug". As he puts it, sometimes the games he plays have things that should be glitches or bugs, but because he genuinely cannot tell if it was a bug or intentionally designed that way, he often calls these situations a "Bethesda Bug" to explain his uncertainty if something was unintentional or not by the developers.
  • Hype Backlash:invoked Several of his videos about popular games like INSIDE (2016), Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild discuss how he finds the games to not be as good as they were hyped up to be, in part because he feels that problems with the games were ignored by critics.
  • Pet-Peeve Trope: Joe hates it when an Unreliable Narrator is used to catch the audience off guard, and isn't justified from an in-world perspective. He also hates it when You Didn't Ask is used in a similar way.
  • Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Discussed in several videos about how important it is for the world to feel believable in spite of it being not real. If a world doesn't match what the story implies, he finds himself unable to immerse himself. For instance, in INSIDE (2016) he argues that the world-building is inconsistent, giving the example that enemies in the game seem to alternate between helping and hindering the player character, while he argues in his The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild video that the world doesn't match the way the story is framed (as in, Ganon has won but the world seems completely fine). This is also one of his biggest gripes with the Fallout series; the games all are set many, many years after the Great War, but civilization has yet to truly bounce back or truly form new forms of society despite how many years have passed.

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