Web Video / Joueur du Grenier

"The year is 2000 AD, and all Gaul is playing high definition consoles. All? No! In one small village, there is a gamer who still holds out against the invaders."

Frédéric "Fred" Molas (born 26 November 1982), a.k.a. Le Joueur du Grenier ("The Attic Gamer") is a French YouTube-based retro video game reviewer who plays mostly horrible (and mostly licensed) games since 2009, but also a few merely Nintendo Hard games, with his sidekick Sébastien "Seb" Rassiat (born 12 October 1982). The JdG team received a third member (Karim Debbache, host of Crossed) in early 2013, who mostly serves to write some videos' scenarios and occasionally makes a cameo.^note he left the team in 2023 to focus on streaming In late 2019, Sad Panda also joined the team as a manager for planning, casting and production, as well as doing behind-the-scenes videos on recent episodes.

He is basically the French equivalent of The Angry Video Game Nerd (although he developed his own style as the videos went on). Prone to getting very, very mad at his video games, he still goes through almost all them, much to his chagrin and to his viewers' amusement.

Being born in The '80s and having grown up in The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium, he also made several specials, nostalgic (or not) videos about animes, TV shows and other weird multimedia stuff that aired in those decades. With time his content has become more diversified and less focused on the classic AVGN-style angry videos, which are still present and popular but released far less frequently than before.

In 2012, he started a Spin-Off series titled Papy Grenier ("Attic Grandpa"), in which he plays an old bearded (and slightly sociopathic) storyteller who humoristically revisits classic cult games in a 5-6 minutes format.

In 2015, he and Seb launched a secondary channel called Bazar du Grenier ("Attic Bazaar"/"Attic Clutter"), where they upload all kinds of videos, ranging from Let's Plays to short movie reviews, future FAQs and blooper videos, and other miscellaneous mini-shows. A notable one is Aventures ("Adventures"), where they, along with other French YouTubers, play a tabletop RPG of their own invention (with visuals provided by the software Roll20). This channel also includes "narrative Let's Plays", mini-series where he and Seb don't just play a game but also enact a whole plot written around the game's mechanics^note Hence why they choose games that don't have a predetermined plot, like survival, management or strategy games. − usually with a healthy dose of Black Comedy.

If you don't speak French, don't worry: most of his videos are subtitled in English on YouTube (though the quality of said subtitles is very hit-and-miss since they're fan-made).

A comic book telling his childhood by Piratesourcil came out in 2012 and ended in 2015 after four volumes.

In 2012, Fred and Seb made four informative videos about Dragon's Dogma. While these videos aren't technically part of the series, they use the same humor that's featured in their more well-known videos.

---

For a list of reviewed works, see here:

• Reviewed Works

---

Joueur du Grenier provides examples of:

Tropes # to H

• 0% Approval Rating: Got kicked out of office in Rulers of Nations for increasing the retirement age by one year, resulting in the entire 60-million-strong French population taking to the street. At 3 AM.
• The '60s: The Superheroes special tackles this period, including a '60s-themed Joueur du Grenier intro.
• Aborted Arc: In the October 2021 FAQ, Fred stated the Mount & Blade narrative LP was dead due to the game constantly crashing.
• Abusive Parents:
  • At one point in Takeshi's Challenge, the protagonist gets home drunk and beats up not only his wife, but also both of his children, even calling one of them a "genetic mistake" in the process.
  • Invoked in the Christmas Special, during a skit featuring a Russian-accented man ordering his kids to take an axe to go cut a tree in the mountains, and while he tells them to beware of bears, it's obvious he barely even cares about their safety.
• Accentuate the Negative:
  • Doesn't happen as much as you'd expect from an angry video game reviewer; when he gives harsh criticism, then it is deserved. Although he does state that the only good moment in the Batman & Robin movie is the end credits.
  • A notable aversion in his Atari games review video: he believes calling E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial the worst game ever made is an exaggeration, and that the video game adaptation of Strawberry Shortcake on the same console (which plays a five-seconds long clip and then is over) is a much worse buy.
  • In "The Tier List of Crappy Games", Fred reiterates E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Superman 64 (two games he mentions often appear as the worst issues in lists about the crappiest video games ever released) aren't so bad.^note According to the same video, the worst video game he ever reviewed is Bubsy 3D, and the second worst is the NES version of Dragon's Lair In the same video, Fred points out The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery is actually a decent point'n click, which wouldn't have been reviewed in the first FMV episode if its French dub wasn't So Bad, It's Good.invoked
    Fred: As time goes by, the more we play crappy games, the more the bottom of the barrel goes up.
  • At the end of the special focused on Glen A. Larson produced-series, Fred points out he reviewed Larson's worst series (Galactica 1980, Automan, Manimal), but most of Larson's production is okay.
    Fred: Well, we just shown three of the worst failures, but [Glen A. Larson] is one of the people who left the biggest mark on the history of the 1980s series. Battlestar Galactica (1978), Magnum, P.I., Knight Rider, they all were huge successes, and they were series from Glen Larson.
  • In the behind-the-scenes comments of the Prince of Persia 2/Alex Kidd video, Fred comments Prince of Persia 2 is actually a decent game flawed by stiff gameplay. While the video's theme is "bad sequels", Fred acknowledges the first game is similar is this aspect.
• Accidental Innuendo:
  • In-Universe: Fingers/arms coming out from holes in the wall in the Total Recall game? And looking like... something else due to the NES graphical limitations? Cue the Ding Dong Song by Gunther!
  • The NES Home Alone review. Two men chasing a young kid, then placing themselves behind him once he's caught (cue "Psycho" Strings).
    JdG: RUN, KID! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! RUN FOR YOUR ASS!
• Actor Allusion: Bob Lennon has been cast as Shaggy in the Scooby-Doo video because he does Shaggy impersonations in his own videos.
• Adaptational Abomination: The review of Barney Hide and Seek turns Barney the Dinosaur into a child-hunting monstrosity. As the game is intended for small children, the kids are very easy to find, there's no way to die and if you leave the game idle, Barney starts walking to the exit by himself. The narration takes this to mean that Barney cannot be hidden from, cannot be killed, and cannot be stopped.
• Adaptational Wimp: Michael Knight in the video covering the games adapted from Knight Rider and Miami Vice, where he ends up crashing into everything on the road, get his car stuck between some containers or upside down, or unable to get out of his car because the child safety lock is on.
• Adaptation Inspiration: The show itself, when compared to The Angry Video Game Nerd. While the main premise (an angry retro video game critic getting enraged by the games he reviews, then destroying them) remains the same, the show itself has a whole different brand of humor, featuring deconstructive parodies, Self-Deprecation, Cutaway Gags, intentionally bad jokes and lots of Lampshade Hanging for good measure, with use of incessant profanity greatly downplayed, and Toilet Humor almost absent^note Its most prominent use was due to the game itself calling for it: it was Toilet Tycoon. As far as character traits go, Grenier appears to come closer to The Nostalgia Critic.^note In fact, this video judges him the closest to The Nostalgia Critic's style among all French video-bloggers.
  
  That being said, the AVGN influence can still be plainly seen in the earlier videos, especially concerning the games both reviewers happen to have tested. The show rarely crosses the line between inspiration and rip-off, one of the most questionable exceptions being ridiculing Obi-Wan Kenobi's pointless remark on the lightsaber being a Jedi's weapon at the beginning of the The Empire Strikes Back NES video game adaptation and subsequently calling him out on not having disclosed how to power-up a jump instead.
• Adapted Out: Some of the films/video games parody lack a counterpart for major characters from the original work.
  • The Harry Potter Special has stand-in of Harry, Hermione, Dumbledore, Hagrid, Lockart, Snape, the Fat Lady, and the Sorting Hat, but there's no stand-in for the character of Ron Weasley.
  • The Skyrim parody in the first RPGs special only features expies of the Dragonborn, the Greybeards, and an unammed dragon.
  • The Ghostbusters parody features Fred, Seb, and recurring extra Sushi respectively cast as the counterparts of Ray, Peter, and Winston, but there's no counterpart to Egon.
• Affably Evil:
  • Played with in the special episode about cartoons adapted from video games. While covering Sonic Underground, JdG notes in a Faux Horrific tone that baby Manic has been taken by an evil kidnapper... who rears him correctly... followed by a skit with Seb playing a villain who says the following:
    Seb: Ah ah ah ah ah! I will rear this child, finance his studies and give him lots of love! I am diabolical!
  • In Castlevania, Dracula's vampire guests and the Grim Reaper may be supernatural monsters, but in the context of the video itself they're just a group of nice people having fun at a party.
• Affectionate Parody:
  • The Takeshi's Challenge review is one to manga and anime as a whole, parodying and satirizing its clichés like there's no tomorrow.
  • The "Games and Metal" episode features Wet Fingers, a parody of Hair Metal bands of the '80s who play a cover of "Kickstart My Heart", as well as Black Metal-themed villains. Seb and Fred, on the other hand, "fight" by playing covers of legendary Thrash songs like "One" or "Tornado of Souls".
• Airstrike Impossible: The whole CPC Airwolf game is centered on a helicopter in a cave. Fred comments on the stupidity of the idea.
• All Animals Are Dogs:
  • At the end of the Jurassic Park episode, the T. rex plays fetch with a game cartridge thrown by Grenier.
  • Frangipanus's home planet has living pains au chocolat that bark like dogs.
• All Just a Dream:
  • In "Games and Metal", the Brütal Legend-inspired Mid-Review Sketch Show scenes turns out to just be Seb's drunken hallucinations. Fred and Seb weren't actually bringing an Artifact of Doom to a temple, they were going to a video-game store to return a copy of Revolution X.
  • Sorina the nurse in Code Bleu thinks that the reason the hospital is so horrible is because she's in a coma nightmare, and so nothing she does matters.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Occasionally invoked.
  • Papy Grenier presents a different interpretation of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Hyrule as an urban ghetto, the Deku Tree as a pedophile ("I love having small children inside me! I give 'em my nuts!") and Zelda as a white trash bitch.
  • In the Who Framed Roger Rabbit video, Fred notices that you play as Eddie Valiant while being constantly followed by a Roger Rabbit who never interacts with anyone or anything while some plot coupons must be found in trashbins. He wonders if the game is supposed to be the story of a semi-homeless and crazy detective suffering from heavy hallucination caused by all the random trash he ate in trashcans, Roger Rabbit being his imaginary friend.
• Alternate Company Equivalent: Seeing The Angry Video Game Nerd as the alternate company... JdG is the equivalent of the Nerd (bespectacled geeks who review bad old video games and get angry), Seb is the equivalent of Mike Matei (the assistant who likes to annoy the main character), Infogrames is the equivalent of LJN (a rainbow-themed video game company that is repeatedly behind bad games the reviewer is covering) and David Goodenough is the equivalent of Fred Fuchs (name taken from a video game's credits and used as a scapegoat character for a bad game's flaw).
• Amalgamated Individual: In the JdG universe, the same company is singlehandedly responsible for every mediocre-to-bad video game there is, aptly named Bad Games, Inc.:
  • David Goodenough (the name of an actual developer on X-Perts) became a recurring character when reimagined as an apathetic project leader with a Meaningful Name, responding to any criticism with a shrug and pointing out a Trivially Obvious positive point about the game (such as "the box closes correctly"). It reached the point where the actual David Goodenough's page on MobyGames is sometimes vandalized by replacing his photo with one of Seb as the character.
  • Jean-Michel Bruitage ("Sound Effects"), an inept sound designer whose "work" includes recording his synthesizer's output when wiping it clean, putting no music because he had to sell his synthesizer to make rent that month, repeating the same three or four notes (when he was testing if the keyboard still worked), and using this sound for a dying giant scorpion.
  • According to his outfit, wig, and mannerisms, the director of Dragonball Evolution, the 1979 Captain America television film, the Resident Evil film series, the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons movie, and its television film-sequel Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God^note Respectively James Wong, Rod Holcomb, Paul W.S. Anderson, Courtney Solomon, and Gerry Lively in real life is the same person.
• Amazing Freaking Grace: In the opening of the TMNT special, "Amazing Grace" is played by two kilted bagpipers during the funeral of the franchise.
• America Saves the Day: Discussed heavily in "World War III (in video games)". Fred points out that since the primary target demographic of war-themed games is the American public, conflicts in games usually end up being about Americans fighting Nazis/Russians/Middle-Eastern terrorists, or thinly veiled stand-ins for the latter in more fictionalized stories. It gets to the point where Battlefield 1, despite mostly taking place in France during World War I (which did make it stand out among the crowd of WW2-inspired games), mainly focused on English-speaking soldiers and limited the French involvement in their own frontline to a DLC side-story.
• Amusement Park of Doom: Papy Grenier certainly runs it like one, with unsafe rides, horrible food, and overinflated prices.
• Anachronism Stew: One of Grenier's complaints about Zelda's Adventure is the presence of a bartender wearing a cap in a medieval setting.
  Seb as a bartender: Hello! Welcome to the Middle Ages. Do you want some Coke?
• Ancient Conspiracy: Dragon's Lair is implied to be part of one.
• Angrish: Except he is French. Still, he falls prey to the French equivalent of this trope.
• Animate Inanimate Object:
  • A common joke in the early videos was about the video game cartridge of the episode coming to life, attacking Fred and being destroyed in a way that references the video game of the episode being reviewed.
  • One side character in some videos is a living slice of galette des rois called Frangipanus, who originates from a whole planet of them.
  • In the 11-year special, Antoine Daniel shows a PSA video depicting the four magical gems as being alive in a cutesy artstyle.
• Animeland: At the start of the Valentine's Day episode, we get a scene in an "ordinary Japanese town". Which includes a tentacle monster assaulting a girl behind a tree, a Pokémon trainer (Fred) ordering a potato to make a "puree" attack, Godzilla burning a building, Son Goku teleporting away, and a Japanese schoolgirl (Sorina-chan) sitting under sakura trees and playing a Dating Sim.
• Anti-Climax: Played for laughs at the end of the Castlevania episode. After Trevor slaughtered everyone in the castle and Alucard makes a big reveal about how he deliberately riled him up (before being offed himself), Trevor confronts Dracula, the last vampire remaining... by politely asking him to lower the music's volume, which Dracula refuses with a flustered expression. Cue an 8-bit animation of the castle collapsing.
• Anti-Climax Boss: In-Universe. JdG has this problem with Dark Castle, Waterworld, Jurassic Park (Sega Genesis) (Mega Drive) and the TMNT NES game.
• Argentina Is Nazi-Land:
  • In the Tropico narrative let's play, the CIA agent mentions in passing that several Nazis fled to South America, and that despite the US hunting them in the '50s, they'd later help them reach positions of power during the Cold War.
  • In the Movies narrative let's play, Margoulin mentions he visited Nuremberg to meet up with some friends who planned to visit South America sometime.
• The Artifact:
  • The intro sequence shot in Fred's old room, with Fred himself looking very different. The first video of 2015 lampshades it by treating the New Year's resolution of getting a new title sequence with a hearty round of HA HA HA—No. Fred himself has stated that he liked how the opening sequence became less and less representative of the actual show with time, and doesn't want to change it since everybody associates it with him. It doesn't help that the opening's quality has not aged well either: the 11th anniversary special (which was filmed in 4k) briefly displays it in its original 360p glory before a mouse cursor comes in and stretches it to fill the screen.
  • Papy Grenier used to be about an old and decrepit Fred recounting his adventures in 90s-era gaming to his grandchildren. To allow for more modern games (Mass Effect, World of Warcraft...), the grandchildren are now adults dropping off their own children for him to babysit and traumatize.
  • The introduction of Roger Rabbit has footages of a few games Fred tried and didn't keep for the reviews in the final version of the video. Each of them feature animals as player characters, which was the original concept for the video.
  • In the alternate universe opening credits of "Wii Games for Girls", Fred has been replaced by his female alternate universe counterpart, but the original male Fred and Seb plushies can be seen on a shelf. Also, while his face has been replaced in the logo, the title still says "Joueur du Grenier" (masculine form) instead of the feminine form "Joueuse du Grenier" (though this is fixed in the actual video's name on Youtube).
• Artifact Title: Invoked at the end of the video for Dragon's Lair: The Legend.
  Seb: Was there a dragon?
  Fred: No!
  Seb: Was there a lair?
  Fred: No!
  Seb: Was there a "'s"?
• Artificial Stupidity: Enemies in several games.
  • Discussed in his "JdG answers your questions" video, when talking about Assassin's Creed. While someone playing Altair runs away, a guard (Seb) starts to run after him. They turn a corner, and Altair sits on a bench. The guard's reaction? "No it's not the same. That one is sitting."
  • Very much demonstrated with GIGN Anti-Terror Force. The bad guys in this game can ignore the player even if they have a straight line of sight, not react to a comrade getting shot right next to them, get unable to move from any obstacle (like a table), or can't hit the player if he's crouching too close, since they can't crouch at all themselves.
  • The LOTR A.I. is very bad about this, be it with enemies or allies.
    JdG: I had him [Merry] in my party for twenty seconds before he got eaten offscreen by a shit-ass wolf because he was Too Dumb to Live!
  • In Mission: Impossible, Fred mocks the stupidity of your follower Candice Parker by using a mannequin to play her during the live-action scenes of the episode.
• Artistic License: The Mission: Impossible review ends with gameplay footages of Fred discovering combat controls aren't disabled in the Developer's Room, then he vents his frustration by beating the game developers' virtual avatars. In a live comment, Fred clarified the sequence is a heavily edited montage of several very short footages from distinct playthroughs (in real life, it's possible to kill one of those NPCs with quick enough button-mashing and some luck, but they all turn hostile once you attack one, and their attacks are One-Hit Kills).
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • A Freeze-Frame Bonus gag during the California Games review contains a (fake) newspaper article which mentions a character coming from "the Western Coast of Brazil".
  • Invoked in the AB Productions special, where Fred comments a Club Dorothée musical segment (where Dorothée instantly goes from some winter weather-region to an African jungle after crossing a line named "border") by describing the scene as "the famous border between North Pole and Africa".
  • In the "Harry Potter" and "Anniversary Part 2" videos, the wizardry school parodying Hogwarts is in France but features houses and prefects.^note Outside of Britain, many Harry Potter readers/watchers assumed houses and prefects were invented for the series' fictional setting instead of being real aspects of British school system.
• Art-Style Dissonance: Antoine Daniel's PSA about the four magical gems looks straight out of a children cartoon and depicts the gems as a group of friends. The red gem introduces himself and the other gems, and explains that collecting them all allows them to grant any wish, including destroying the universe. Then the gems dance in a circle and sing, their voices as cute as always, about how they will destroy the universe.
• Asbestos-Free Cereal: The Back to Future II episode starts with Fred enthusiastically coming back from a trip to the future, where he notably had a taste of "asbestos-free Coca-Cola Zero".
• As Himself:
  • Video-game journalist Julien Chièze plays his own role in the Mission: Impossible episode. Before appearing in person, the episode includes extracts of a review of the game written by Chièze in a video-game magazine.
  • You would think the name François Lebreton from the Stereotype Reaction Gag is a made-up name to highlight how non-stereotypically Japanese the character is (as it translates literally to Frenchman the Briton)... Turns out it's the actor's real name.
  • The ending of Games and Metal has Fred and Seb returning the Revolution X cart to the store they bought it. The scene has been shot in their town's actual video-game store, and the actor playing the store clerk is the store's owner in real life.
• Aside Glance: Gives a very panicked one towards the camera when faced with an impossible obstacle in Airwolf, complete with the caption "IMPOSSIBLE" popping up in front of him.
• Ass Shove:
  • How he gets the NES cart in the Dragon's Lair video.
  • Another in the Taz-Mania review, where he threatens to shove Seb's flute somewhere if he doesn't start playing more appropriate music.
  • After a while reviewing the game based on Les Visiteurs, he gets so upset that he threatens the game creators with this:
    JdG: Now, mazes... you're gonna stop this right now, because if I see just half of one again, I swear I won't need several hours to find you and to stick this [the game cartridge] inside your small intestine... along with the console... and the joysticks... vibrating...
• Astronomic Zoom: A revert zoom along with the Skyward Scream at the end of the TMNT NES review.
• As You Know:
  • From the very beginning of the episode, and throughout the review of the first live-action Dragon Ball, Fred and Seb mock how often the characters, especially the villain, exposition about the Dragon Balls for no reason and to nobody in particular.
  • Fred points out that Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City does it all the time.
    Truck Driver: Ah, yes, you said that you're coming to see your brother, right? He lived nearby, you said? In Raccoon City! There's nothing left but raccoons since Umbrella started to leave—
    Claire Redfield: I! Know! That!
• Atomic F-Bomb: In the second video about RPGs from 2014, Fred (as "Enfant de Juron") charges his power with a volley of insults, then unleashes a giant "FILS DE PUTE!" ("SON OF BITCH!") against the SNES Lord of the Rings.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: In-Universe.
  • Brought up in his review of the video game adaptation of Cool World:
    JdG: So, for some reason, Cool World was adapted into a fuckton of games. On Game Boy, NES, Super NES, Atari ST, Amiga... You've gotta explain the marketing here, I mean, why so many games? Who's gonna buy 'em? Who did you buy games for, back then? Kids! Who's gonna watch this movie? Not kids, I hope, that would be weird!
  • In the episode about Merchandise-Driven shows, Grenier "admits" that Joueur du Grenier is itself the Merchandise-Driven show of a line of pull-ring dolls, then wonders why said dolls never really took off. Given that the lines they say are jokes of dubious taste, it's no wonder that kids didn't like them.
• The Backwards Я: On a poster behind him◊ in the Papy Grenier video about SimCity. (It means "Join SimCity" in French.)
• Badass Decay: In-Universe. One of the reasons he dislikes Dragon Ball GT is because Trunks has become a pansy (although he is not supposed to be the same as Future Trunks). His opinion on adult Gohan in Dragon Ball Super is the same.
  [image of Gohan being depowered]
  JdG: Hi, I'm a little shit.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Used during the reenactment of the dubbing of Excalibur 2555 A.D.
• Bad Future: Many Papy Grenier episodes start with him saying X hadn't happened yet at the time of the story, such as Pewdiepie being a planetary dictator to Disneyland Paris becoming a swingers' club.
• The Bad Guy Wins: The ending of The Movies Let's Play: Margoulin is now a rich and respected filmmaker who used a bastardized version of his ex-director's biography as his biggest artistic achievement (said ex-director dies of a heart attack when he sees the result), and his biopic gives him a major Historical Hero Upgrade that everyone believes to be the truth.
• Bad Santa: On the run from the FBI and the revenue service in the first commercial special.
• Bad Vibrations: A glass of water at the end of the Jurassic Park games review, naturally. Including Grenier lampshading how predictable this is.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • On the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game:
    JdG: Give me one fun activity involving entering and exiting holes? [Beat]
    Seb: Errr... Speleology?
  • In the Airwolf review, he notes that the NES version can be finished in 10 minutes, and since it cost 500 Francs (about 82 US dollars at the time^note According to this the exchange rate in late 1988 was 6.0935) when it came out, the game cost 50 francs per minute.
    JdG: For fifty francs per minute, you can buy something much more interesting, if you know what I mean...
    [cut to a creaking bed]
    JdG: Like renting a creaky bed!
    [camera pans to JdG, reading a comic book and bouncing alone on the bed]
    JdG: ... What did I do that for?!
  • This character is referred to as the greatest detective ever, has had more games on every platform than any other, name starts with B and A...
    Seb: Batman?
    JdG: No, Barbie.
  • In one video, Fred can't get past a level, so he calls a man named Nakajima for help. The guy angrily answers, in perfect French, that he's actually called François Lebreton and lives in Vitré, Brittany, but Fred claims not to understand his foreign language. The guy reluctantly does finish the impossible level anyway.
  • The description of the Instruments of Chaos Starring Young Indiana Jones review says that "this video may contain a cameo". At the end of the video, Fred's ancestor, Archibald Von Grenier admits that he's not actually Fred's ancestor and asks him to pay attention on the initials of "Archibald Von Grenier" (with a little emphasis on Grenier's letter N), Fred then lists the letters A, V, G and N and exclaims "Wait, you are..." only for Archibald to reveal himself as an alien named "Alpha V de Gelganech" who is not related to the Angry Video Game Nerd in any way. Fred is then stuck with a dumbfounded expression for the rest of the video.
  • The opening of the Phoenix Games video introduces the video's theme as a sequel to the Disney video, then Fred opens the box of games he just bought for the review and finds it only contains games by Phoenix Games. The subversion actually makes sense, as the first part of the review focuses on Phoenix Games' production falsely pretending to sell adaptations of Disney movies.
• Banana Peel:
  • For the review of Drake of the 99 Dragons, to show how easy it is to die in the game, a sketch with Fred as the eponymous Drake has him slip on a banana peel... and die.
  • The second comics-based games episode starts off with a parody of Barbara Gordon / Oracle's origin story, showing how Commissioner Magret's daughter got crippled following an attack by the villainous Banana-Man... who threw a banana peel at her, on which she slipped (which is shown in slow-motion and with dramatic music).
  • Subverted in the Scooby-Doo episode, where Fred's final trap for the Red Ghost is to drop a banana peel on the floor. When the Red Ghost comes close, instead of slipping it stops... and complains that people should put banana peels into a trash bin, it's just dirty.
• Bar Brawl: In the Dungeons & Dragons special, Grenier makes fun of just how easily the heroes cause one with a skit where a waitress accidentally lets a glass fall... causing the entire inn to devolve into a freefight within seconds.
• Bat Deduction:
  • In the test of The Legend of Zelda: Faces of Evil, this is how he finds the solution to unlock a door after listening to a really obscure hint in a dialog. He then says that it was a joke: he was stuck there and was forced to read a walkthrough.
  • The Trope Namer itself is featured in the review of Batman: The Movie, causing a serious breakdown.
  • Ironically, JdG (or rather, Duck-Man) makes one such deduction himself in the DC Comics games episode. Since the least awful of the games tested by Seb was Aquaman, then Joker-Seb must be hiding... under the sea.
• Battle of the Bands: The episode "Games and Metal", about games inspired by music, has Fred and Seb in a musical fight against the group "Wet Fingers" for the right of passage through Shiny City, then later against a Black Metal band in the forest.
• Beat: Invoked in the Fort Boyard episode, when he explains that one of the elements which make the Fort Boyard: Legends point'n click unintentionally hilarious is that each dialog cutscene ends with an awkwardly long silence before going back to the game.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Laurent Croft's butler is mercilessly abused by his employer, down to being used as target practice.
• Berserk Button:
  • Being a big fan of Jurassic Park, Fred takes the franchise seriously and scenes like a woman in high heels outrunning a dinosaur, or dinosaurs acting above animal instinct, angers him a lot. His critic of the second Jurassic World has him really upset.
  • Any mention of Star Citizen's infamous Development Hell has Fred draw out a firearm and dare the person to finish their sentence.
• Bestiality Is Depraved:
  • JdG talks about how his cartoon crush as a kid was Sailor Mercury. Seb then says he liked the "female cat". JdG is shocked, thinking he means Luna (who is presented as a non-anthropomorphic cat). However, Seb specifies he means Cleo from Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats (she is an anthropomorphic cat).
  • In the special episode about sport-themed cartoons, JdG is squicked by a scene of Kangoo^note a French animated series which protagonists are humanized kangaroos (they talk and they wear clothes) playing basketball in which a (human) woman is flirting with a (kangaroo) male character.
    JdG: Perhaps I lost my childhood mind, but don't you have hundreds of gross pictures popping in your head when watching such a scene?
  • And in the erotic games review, progress requires banging a sheep. Cue Relax-o-Vision and Shower of Angst!
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Invoked in the Cool World episode, in which JdG notices that several of the movie's video-game adaptation prominently features Holli (one of them even includes a disk which only contains an animation of her dancing), despite her not being the main character.
• BFG: For the final action sequence of the Platoon/Metal Gear video, JdG carries an MG 42. He clarifies in the comments that it is a real one, and damn heavy.
• Big Fun: Was this at the beginning of the series, but lost weight for health reasons.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Invoked. In the second level of Back to the Future III, in which Marty flings plates at enemies, a few ducks suddenly appear. Grenier immediately goes like, "I didn't see anything. I must be tired."
• Big "NO!":
  • At the end of the sports game episode. The next episode starts with this same scene.
  • He re-uses Anakin's Big "NO!" in the girl shows special when he discovers the next show he must review is My Little Pony (the old one, not the memetic one.).
• Big "SHUT UP!":
  • A few times, most notably in the Saint Seiya episode.
  • At the end of his rant about how the music in Airwolf gets really annoying really fast since the "mute" function cancels itself every time he loses a game, which happens every five seconds.
  • The propensity of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon for Narrating the Obvious inspires another one.
• Big "WHAT?!": Well, Big "QUOI!?", frequently, when something baffling happens. The Bat Deduction from Batman: The Movie inspires an epic one.
• Bile Fascination: In-Universe. The principle of the show is watching a guy reviewing So Bad, It's Good (or just plain bad) video games. Bile Fascination by proxy.
• Bilingual Dialogue: The review for Anti Terror Force has dialogue between Fred and Doug Walker where the former speaks French and the latter speaks (subtitled) English, and they understand each other perfectly.
• Binomium ridiculus: In a nod to the parent animated shorts series' Trope Codifier status, these are used in the intro to the Road Runner review, where the game is identified as "video gamus pourritus" ("rottenus"), and the Joueur du Grenier (in Wile E. Coyote's role) as "testeuris enervus" ("iratus revieweris").
• Bit Character: Some recurring characters start to appear as the episodes go on, most of them played by Seb.
  • The first one was the CEO of Bad Games inc., who has a cigar, a white cat and (half of the time) an Italian accent.
  • Then there is Jean-Michel Bruitage, a Japanese guy with white hair (played by Seb with his eyes closed and a wig) who does the sound effects with his mouth or random objects and composes the crappy music in equally crappy games. Often accidentally.
    Jean-Michel Bruitage: What is sound design? No really, what is sound design? I don't understand that word.
  • The old bearded sage, who's anything but sage and is quite the mysogynist on top of that. Mostly appears in the RPG episodes.
  • Duckman, a Batman parody who appears in superhero-themed episodes.
  • Captain Igloo, the mascot of a brand of breaded fish who really wants you to eat his breaded fish sticks.
  • David Goodenough, a lazy game developer who's satisfied with any result that's remotely passable (and based on a real name in a game's credits).
  • Alpha V of Gelganech, an alien who appears in episodes that are totally-plot-related-we-swear and isn't above dropping cynical remarks here and there.
  • Carol from Marketing, who shows up to announce that the game is running over budget (at least in part because she spent it on Hookers and Blow).
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: When Fred writes ads for sponsored videos, they can get... surprisingly nasty. Fortunately the "humor" part is never forgotten, leading to most commenters saying they find the sponsorship just as entertaining as the rest of the video, making it far less grating.
  • The World of Tanks ad stars a member of Those Wacky Nazis clearly trying to relive the war.
  • His plug of Displate took such a dump on their Plant-a-Tree initiative, a lot of commenters were actively wondering how the company even approved that.
    Fred: It's so eco-friendly, I ordered ten! All shipped separately! By plane! Boy, do I love saving the planet!
  • The sponsored ad for the infamous mobile game Raid: Shadow Legends takes the cake, describing the game as perfect to be played on the toilet during a bout of diarrhea.
  • Retroactively towards all of the above: during the Genshin Impact ad, Fred flat-out says "And we did play this one!"
  • In a Nord VPN ad, the woman mentioning the "Youtube Premium" service causes everyone to burst into laughter. "No one buys Youtube Premium..."
  • One ad feature the claim that it can be used to watch sporting events available only in Belgium. Cue Fred bored out of his mind in front of a potatoto-throwing competition, switching to Swiss events (a chocolate-throwing competition), and waking up hours later in front of a Luxembourgeois accounting competition.
  • The ad in "Wii Games for Girls" congratulates Nord VPN for winning the title of Product of the Year, before pointing out that it now stands alongside humorously lame stuff such as brands of sponges and cat litter. In the actual episode's introduction, Fred answers Seb he has no idea what a VPN is when Seb tells he'll install a VPN on Fred's computer.
• Bittersweet Ending: Compared to the Tropico and Long Dark narratives, Frostpunk ends on a lighter note, with the colony surviving through the ice storm, and the weather on its way to becoming normal again. But the worker had to sacrifice her daughter, and killed the Overseer in despair a few days later.
• Black Comedy:
  • When reviewing China Syndrome on Atari 2600, he argues about the plot being "completely unrealistic". The video was posted in April 2011 and said plot involves a nuclear incident triggered by an earthquake somewhere in Asia... The intentional irony is made even more unsettling by a unusual camera angle while he is saying this.
  • Another example in his Addams Family games review when Seb gives him another game while wearing white all over his face and a bald cap, looking like Uncle Fester.
    JdG: Oh, I get it, you're disguised as Fester! Very funny!
    Seb: Nope, I have cancer!
    [both laugh]
    JdG: Wait, that's not funny at all.
  • The JDG: La Revanche video about Airwolf starts with fake Airwolf credits, which end with "Created by Stevie Ray Balavoine".
  • The episodes post-2013 (around the time Fred lost weight) tend to be more heavy with dark humor, such as Duckman and Night Eagle ruthlessly murdering a bunch of grade schoolers playing laser tag because they thought they were the Riddler's underlings. The Bazaar videos like Random Games and Narrative Let's Plays, even more so.
  • The video game commercials special has a sequence mocking French ads for the The Sims (commented gameplay footages, ending with a photograph of the real player) by creating a fake ad consisting of shots of an empty, silent Sims house, followed by the portrait of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès.^note A mysterious criminal affair which happened in 2011 France. Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès is the patriarch of a family who was murdered, and their corpses where found buried in their home under a terrace, but there was no trace of the father himself, who is strongly suspected of being the murderer. A decade later, the case is still unsolved and Dupont de Ligonnès' fate is still unknown.
• Blasphemous Boast: "Chuck Norris himself could not beat this game!"
• Blatant Lies:
  • During The Legend of Zelda: Faces of Evil review, JdG says he broke his CD-i controller, the other one he had he lost, and Seb finally got him one, after which he thanks Seb. During the speech, a Photo Montage is shown, where JdG deliberately throws the other CD-i controller away and when Seb finds him one, JdG runs after Seb with a rifle and tries to shoot him.
  • In the Phoenix Games video, Fred confronts the employee in the video game store he's a regular of, suspecting being sold crappy video games for the last 13 years is part of a conspiracy. The man laughts it off (in a very unconvincing tone), then a camera watching on the store and three guys in Conspicuous Trenchcoat immediately answers there's no conspiracy.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation:
  • Also, a part of the second special. He takes Nicky Larson (City Hunter) and Dragon Ball as examples.
    JdG: These translations are dumb, butinvoked they have their charm and are one of the reasons City Hunter was so successful. You like it or you hate it, that's your own opinion.
    But there's one thing I won't forgive, it's Dragon Ball Z, and the translations of the attacks!
    Gohan: Magic rayyyyyyy!
  • An ascended one: Beat 'em Up games are known as "Beat Them All" (in Gratuitous English) in France due to an early mistranslation.
• Blind Shoulder Toss:
  • In the Papy Grenier episode for World of Warcraft, the captain of a ship trying to find the other "hidden" continents of Azeroth can't tell what is starboard or the stern, and he finally tosses his spyglass in the sea behind him in defeat.
  • For the Men In Black game, to illustrate how the Olmec statuette found at the end of level 1 has no relevance to the plot, we get a sketch of Seb briefly describing it, before tossing it away and sending the player to a mission in Antarctica. Later, he also does it with the "rare molecule" vial found at the end of level 2, which again is irrelevant to level 3.
• Blunt "Yes": In Code Bleu, the nurse mentions intensive care is just the doctors giving them patients they don't feel like treating. The head doctor standing right next to her apathetically confesses it.
• Body Horror: At one point in The Addams Family special, Seb shows up to Fred with very pale skin, dark undereyes and bald head, Fred assumes he's disguised as Uncle Fester, they both laugh, then Seb reveals that he actually has cancer, and they laugh again before Fred realizes it's not funny.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Parodied at the end of the James Bond Jr. episode. JdG is captured by an unnamed villain (who has the same appearance and mannerism that the Mauvais Jeux Inc. CEO) who ties him to a bomb after giving him the bomb's manual and a knife. JdG eventually unplugs it.
• Boobs-and-Butt Pose: In the Beat 'em Up special, on a Charlie's Angels adaptation where the characters strike one all the time:
  JdG: I've got nothing against women arching their backs, but this is scoliosis!
• Bottle Episode: The Dragon's Lair: The Legend (August 2019), Nintendo accessories (March 2020) and second FMV games (April 2020) episodes are shorter than average, they feature no Mid-Review Sketch Show and much less extras than usual. Fred explains he has deliberately made less ambitious than usual episodes in order to save time to be able to work on the special episode celebrating the channel's 10th anniversary, while being able to release normal JdG episodes at all.^note It actually didn't work. Dragon's Lair: The Legend saved a couple days, but not enough to be really useful, the second video was released a dozen days before France decreed containment measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, and the third video was made and released during the lockdown, making the whole question a moot point because the containment prevents Fred and Seb from meeting the extras and shoot their scenes.
• Bread and Circuses: In the "Moi Président" videos, the Olympic Games, Tour de France and Euro football tournaments are used to increase the President's abysmal approval rating.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: In his Looney Tunes game review, when talking about bad Looney Tunes games, he mentions that there're "games with shitty controls, games that are impossibly hard, and games with shitty controls that are impossibly hard."
• Brick Joke:
  • The James Bond Jr. episode has a gameplay scene where the plane piloted by the player is instantly destroyed after its hit-box touches a leaf protruding from a tree branch. The episode's Mid-Review Sketch ends with the big bad (the CEO of Mauvais Jeux Inc. in his first appearance) fleeing in a helicopter and hitting a leaf.
    "Oh, a leaf!" [cue kaboom]
  • When reviewing The Addams Family, he states that the sound which is played each times the protagonist is hurt (which is "often") is very annoying and sounds a bit like a dog whistle. A few minutes later during the test, two dogs appears in the room.
  • In the commercials special, there's a Running Gag involving Captain Igloo getting in trouble with the law because of the innuendos behind his commercial. Later on, there's a sketch where we can hear Santa running away from cops. Both of them show up at Fred's home in the ending.
  • In the Harry Potter video, the Sorting Hat tells "Texas Granger" (the Hermione Expy) she should be worried to be "two weeks late". Later in the video, she's seen using a pregnancy test. Also, there's an early joke that "Henri" got his scar in a traffic accident; the main villain wants to kill him for running over his mom in said accident.
  • In the opening of Playboy: The Mansion video on Jeux en Vrac, he mentions that said video is 2017 Saint-Valentin-themed video, and that the only other choice would have a been "a brothel simulator in German". He really had such a game (Reeperbahn Simulator), which eventually got its own Jeux en Vrac video one year and an half later.
  • In the Robin Hood video, the Merry Men include Robin, Little John, Friar Tuck, and Mercy "because the team needed a healer". It comes in handy when a soldier stabs John in the final battle.
  • In the opening of the Weird Dreams video on Jeux en Vrac, he asks: "Did you ever have weird dreams, like really weird, like for instance running in the desert while wearing pajamas and being chased by dick-headed ostriches?" This is a toned-down description of a scene from the game, featured in a later part of the video.
  • His Syphon Filter Jeux en Vrac video has Fred note the non-indicative name of the game by holding an actual syphon filter in his hand and quipping that, "Since I've shown it on screen, it counts as a business expense." The last twenty seconds of the video are dedicated to Fred making as many chores-related puns as possible ("the devs really cleaned up their shit" while holding toilet paper, for example) since, "If I show these on screen I can count them as business expenses too!"
  • In the Club JdG episode about French adventure-themed gameshows, the second of the four shows featured is En Route Pour L'Aventure, which Fred describes as having a very stressful pacing due to its very tight timing and the host constantly insisting the kid contenders acting quicker (both during and between the actual trials). At the end of the video, Fred's conclusion is cut short by the En Route Pour L'Aventure host (or rather Fred impersonating him) because the show's allowed time has expired.
  • In the Daikatana video, the section about the game's disastrous sound design has a gag with Jean-Michel Bruitages committing suicide by defenestration. A few minutes later, the segment about sound design ends with his body's fall landing in Fred's gaming room.
• Broke the Rating Scale: The Bazar review of Suicide Squad has Seb rate the movie "DGAF out of 20", and Fred liking it even less.
• Brown Note: "If my ears could vomit, they would!" or variations are said about many games' annoying sounds.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Unlike the ruthless, if not sadistic yet visibly competent rulers from the Bazar's other narrative Let's Plays, there is Antonio Garavo, El Presidente of Tropico. He looks at first glance like a well-meaning but bumbling and pretty inept demagogue who loves making bloated and rather silly speeches (like praising the emancipatory virtues of bananas), wrote what can be charitably described as softcore-porn James Bond self-insert fanfictions while fancying himself as such a great writer of spy fiction that he made Tropican children learn reading with the aforementioned books, and at times seems more interested in crafting and testing new smoothies than actually governing his country. Yet at the same time, he manages to be constantly reelected without rigging elections, thwarts so many attempted invasions, rebellions and military coups than by the late fifties, they have become so much a routine that the very blasé president is watching and commenting them from his palace balcony, managed to build a spy network efficient enough to teach him a bunch of US military secrets (which he then spills during interviews), and despite the state of nearly constant civil war manages to maintain a functioning economy and advanced research infrastructure which allows Tropico to build a working nuclear power plant one year BEFORE the Shippingport Atomic Power Station goes online.
  
  Of course, since the eighth episode reveals that the CIA instructor whose classes serve as the Framing Device of the series was turned into a pro-Tropico Deep Cover Agent by Garavo's very lenient penal policy and liberal use of smoothies, the whole series might be an elaborate propaganda ploy meant to make the young recruits — as well as the audience — sympathetic to Tropico's strongman. Overlaps with Beware the Silly Ones: whether he's a Wide-Eyed Idealist who nonetheless excels at politics, a Machiavellian strongman who managed to plant a Double Agent at the heart of the CIA where he uses his Servile Snarker schtick about the great many times the USA failed to live up to its lofty principles to make the next generation of recruits less than enthusiastic about helping overthrow El Presidente or both at the same time, he's way more formidable than his bumbling outward personality hints at.
• Burning Rubber: Grenier leaves trails of flame behind from accelerating at the end of the Taz-Mania review.
• Button Mashing:
  • Does it (obviously) in his Track & Field review with his fingers, his shirt and later with a rolling pin.
  • Takes it to the next level in Dragon's Lair, where he uses a jackhammer.
  • For Street Fighter, he explains the obvious problem of having the game's buttons depending on pressure by showing Seb smashing them with a baseball bat.
• Call-Back:
  • In the Dragon's Lair video, when he go to fetch the game in his Torture Cellar, we can see an Alf plushy and a chained Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cart.
  • In the beginning of the Virus video, we see that his garden contains a menhir (Asterix and the Great Rescue), a bomber (The Smurfs), a koalaplatypus-headed robot (Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue), and a DeLorean (Back to the Future Part II and III)
  • When he adds Elite (the company behind Dragon's Lair and the Airwolf games) to his list of enemies, you can see a picture of Cryo (the company which made Virus and Timecop, two games he reviewed), a picture of Infogrames, one picture of Ariane Carletti (who did an infamous opening theme for Dragon Ball Z that he hates) and another one of Hashizo from Ai Shite Night, whom he describes as a creepy and sociopathic stalker in his special episode about animated shows for girls.
  • During the FAQ video, when talking about the first Assassin's Creed, he demonstrate how stupid it is for stealth-based game guards to not recognize the hero they chase if he sits somewhere (even in plain view). In the Platoon / Metal Gear review, one of the minor characters is a guy dressed like Ezio, who is constantly "sitting anywhere, believing nobody saw him".
  • One episode starts with an old private joke: A Cartridge of Goonies 2 floating before him telling him it's cursed. He himself comments that the last time they did that was in 2012, and then the game magically transports him back to when Seb had a squeaky voice and the audio and overhall quality was 360P tops, forcing him to play it because it's in the intro since the beginning of the show and never got reviewed. The thing is, the game's good, so he switched to X-Perts on the Sega Genesis, and at the end, destroys it like he used to do back then.
  • In the Ghostbusters episode, when playing the first NES game, Fred has a traumatic flashback when he notices that the game is similar to The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants and has been made by the same developpers. And later in the episode, when Fred accidentally releases all the bad games in the city, we see spectral versions of a Virtual Hydlide player character, Tintin, and a Ninja Turtle.
  • The Dumbledore Expy from the Harry Potter episode and the old wizard from the RPG trilogy (two characters played by Seb) are the same person, according to a line from the Hermione Expy.
  • The Harry Potter episode features a brief joke about the SEGPA kids (SEGPA being the French education system's "special needs" class) messing around with the fire alarms. Hogwarts Legacy would later show that the SEGPA actually counts as a separate house, and it's of course Sega-themed.
  • In the Valentine's Day special, when he reviews the Magical Date game, one of the datable girls is Kasumi Fuyuno, that he nicknames "Sailor Mercury" due to her resemblance with Ami Mizuno. In the gameplay, he is shown as choosing this girl to go on a date with. JdG mentioned in an older episode that his early cartoon crush was Sailor Mercury.
  • "Wii Games for Girls" is essentially written as the alternate universe counterpart of "Fighting Games #2", featuring a similar premise and a few of the same jokes.
• Calvinball: To illustrate how random Prince of Persia 2 is, JdG suggests playing Monopoly while changing the rules haphazardly, Risk pawns invading the streets, and using Trivial Pursuit spokes, Uno cards, and Mouse Trap elements.
• The Cameo:
  • His Platoon / Metal Gear video ends with an appearance by Doug Walker.
  • In the Road Runner / Taz-Mania video, French Let's Player Bob Lennon appears as a "useless cameo" who shoots himself in the head when asked to testify on how bad the Road Runner game is. Coincidentally, Bob Lennon also appeared along with JdG and Seb in an episode of Noob.
  • On the opposite end of things, he makes a cameo in a video by James Rolfe's co-star Mike Matei on unlicensed NES games, in which he is shown playing a game that Mike couldn't reviewinvoked because it was only released in French (Les Chevaliers du Zodiaque).
    JdG: [untranslated] Ah! Sacrebleu, I hate this game! Yes, I'm a French stereotype.
  • His Papy Grenier episode about SimCity is full of cameos of French video testers.
  • At the end of the girly cartoons special, when the magical girls crossover suddenly feature a tentacle monster, you naturally have Pedobear leaning in from the edge of the screen.
  • Doug Walker again, Bob Lennon, and Frédéric Zolfanelli (Sparadrap from Noob) in the Elite Force Navy Seals/GIGN Anti-Terror Force video.
  • The 2013 "Fighting Games" video features most of the NESBlog team, Antoine Daniel, and Benzaie and Bob Lennon (only in the multiple ending).
  • The DC Comics adaptations video opens with Seb (dressed as the Joker and seconded by a Harley Quinn copy) torturing Marcus, while Duck-Man is fighting against Usul and Karim Debbache, respectively dressed as Spirou and Tintin. This is lampshaded shortly afterwards.
  • The Home Alone review has vocal cameos, from Brigitte Lecordier and Benoît Allemane, known as the French voices of Son Goku and Morgan Freeman respectively.
  • Subverted in the Instruments of Chaos video. The YouTube video's description announces that the video may include a famous cameo... Then, in the ending, Archibald von Grenier happens to be AVGN under a disguise. The AVGN theme begins to be played when JdG realizes that there was a clue in the initials, then Archibald reveals his true identity: Alpha V from GelgaNek, an alien who is unrelated with the Angry Video Game Nerd.
  • The Daemon Summoner video has Benzaie reusing one of his Hard Corner characters (a video-game developer), complete with said character's Catchphrase ("but... it's beyond comprehension!").
  • The 'Harry Potter'' video has Benzaie, Bob Lennon, Bruce Benamran, Cyprien, Linksthesun and other French youtubers.
  • Antoine Daniel as a Nick Fury expy at the end of the Men In Black video and during the 11th Anniversary episode.
  • One of the enemies showing up during the rail-shooter sequence at the end of "Games and Metal" is Archibald Von Grenier.
  • Two in the 11th anniversary episode:
    • Viceroy Frangipanus (the galette) is dubbed by voice-acting legend Richard Darbois (official dubber of pretty much every movie star you can think of, and countless animated characters such as the Genie from Aladdin or Buzz Lightyear), solely because Fred "enjoyed wasting his money".
    • JdG's fully admitted inspiration from the The Angry Video Game Nerd comes full circle with a cameo of the Nerd himself.
• Canon Defilement: invoked LOTR part one features, among other things, a long Fetch Quest just to get out of the Shire, the elves demanding six amulets to prove Frodo worthy of bearing the ring in the first place, Aragorn not joining until you give him a flower, the full party fighting the Balrog, and Gandalf walking out of Moria with the others.
  JdG: Breaking into Tolkien's tomb and pissing on his bones would be less insulting than this game!
• Can't You Read the Sign?: At the beginning of the DC Comics games review, after the two Wanted Posters are ripped off, underneath is a note saying "Please do not rip away the posters, thanks."
• Captain Obvious:
  • "But what I love in this tutorial is when they stop you during the action to give you really useful advice like: 'To jump, press the jump button.' Thank you Captain Obvious."
  • "I know that many of you will have their birthday this year..." (Beat)
  • "But if we can talk about Street Fighter II, it implies that there was a Street Fighter before it." (clapping) "Thank you, that's nice."
  • Seb can fall into this too:
    Seb: The Prince of Tennis. It's an anime... about tennis.
    [JdG rolls eyes]
  • In the D&D special, The Dragon comments that he can always tell a thief by the way they take things that don't belong to them. Cut to the JdG version, set in a woodshop...
  Damodar: I can always tell a carpenter by the way they work with wood.
• Caustic Critic: Guess who.
• Celestial Bureaucracy: The story of the Bible-games episode has Fred dying and being sent to the afterlife administration (which looks like a perfectly mundane office setting), where he has to be sorted between Heaven or Hell.
• The Chains of Commanding: Seb's character in the Frostpunk Narrative more than once admits he has no idea what he's doing, wasn't prepared to lead, and has to make his group survive the apocalypse.
• Chaos Architecture: Never lampshaded, but justified when in an out-of-character video, Frédéric mentions that he was moving out of the house where he first started making videos. His new room is decorated so similarly to his old room however, that to an uninformed observer, it appears that his room suddenly went from having a wall on the right to having a wall on the left.
• Character Blog: Texas Granger from the Harry Potter video has an Instagram account, fed by Benzaie himself.
• Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys:
  • Subverted in the Civilization playthroughs, where the French are bloodthirsty little bastards with quite a few victories to their names. While as Napoleon he often showed Pragmatic Villainy when dealing with his opponents and managed to crush anyone who was a military threat. As Catherine de Medicis however, he plays a bloodthirsty tyrant, ruling an unstoppable military power, who exterminates anyone who looks at him funny... and even those who don't.
  • Played straight in the second World of Tanks video, where a tank is seen retreating and it's commented that it's normal behavior for a French-made tank.
• Chest of Medals: As Mayor of SimCity.
• Chirping Crickets:
  • In the Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue episode, after the transition from a fight scene of the TV series to the game itself, to illustrate how dull it is.
  • In the James Bond Jr. episode, when JdG is trying to remind the audience of the cartoon, all he gets is the sound of wind... and a tumbleweed rolling by.
  • In the Papy Grenier episode about Mass Effect, crickets are heard when Sheppard mentions Kaidan's death; apparently none of his teammates remember him.
  • Also heard in the review for Super Monkey Daibouken, to express how the characters are moving very slowly in a gigantic map.
• Christmas Episode:
  • Subverted in his Jurassic Park video. This is how it starts:
    JdG: [dressed as Santa, doing the Santa voice] Ho-ho-ho, hi everyone! It's Christmas time as you know, and to celebrate I decided to make a video [removes hat and beard, uses his regular voice] which has nothing to do with Christmas.
  • Also subverted by the Nightmare Circus video, which starts out like a Halloween special.
  • One of the hors-série episodes was about Christmas specials: ALF's special with the Littlest Cancer Patient, He-Man's special, and The Star Wars Holiday Special.
• Circus of Fear:
  • Nighmare Circus, naturally, what with demon clowns and monsters and hellfire everywhere.
  • Circus Simulator starts off like one, with invisible children laughing, footsteps approaching you, empty cages and tents everywhere... and as soon as you buy your first ATM, a Bill Cosby-looking guy with a permanent grin with blood on his hands.
• Classically-Trained Extra: Played for Laughs on a couple occasions, with Benoît Allemane and Richard Darbois (the French dub voices of Morgan Freeman and Harrison Ford, amongst other things) making appearances to play a sock and a sentient slice of frangipane cake respectively.
• Clingy MacGuffin: The Super-NES cartridge of Ultraman comes back to Grenier no matter how many times he throws it away.
• Clothes Make the Legend: His flower-adorned yellow button shirt. He decided to wear it to make the visuals more cheerful, and also as a homage to (now gone) French singer Carlos, who was also a portly bearded man in flowery shirts.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb:
  • In the beginning of the mid-review sketch of Tomb Raider: Search for the Mysterious Green Dollar, when Laurent Croft discovers everything remotely sensitive is censored in-universe, the following dialog ensues with his butler:
    Laurent Croft: Winston! Winston! Let me know, what do you exactly think of me?
    Winston: Sir, I'd say you're a huge [bleep], a degenerate and lecherous son of a [bleep], an [bleep]-hole and also a [bleep], and to conclude an absolute [bleep].^note According to the words' length and small uncensored bits, the bleeped out parts are, in this order "jerkass", "son of a bitch", "asshole", "moron", "absolute imbecile" (in French, "le roi des cons", literally "the king of the dumb ones")
    Laurent Croft: Thanks, Winston.
    Winston: You're welcome, [bleep]!
  • Also happens in the video "Le SAV d'Internet", where Fred is complaining to YouTube that he can't swear anymore without being demonetized, and Cyprien has to repeatedly hit the bleeping button to cover his profanity-laden rant.
• Colbert Bump:invoked
  • Claims that 48 Zozan Kebabs were created after he mentioned them in the second FAQ.
  • The final Tintin in Tibet video features several clips from the Tintin YouTube Poop "Pendant ce temps à Moulinsart".
• Collision Damage: In Ultraman. A Fighting Game.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: JdG wears a yellow shirt when he reviews bad games, a blue-white shirt when he reviews cartoons and other non-game media, an orange one when he is playing a good game (or pretending to) or playing Papy Grenier, a black one (when he's terribly depressed) and whatever he wants when he's out of character or during the Bazar du Grenier videos. He sometimes "magically" changes his shirt when he switches topics to keep this theme consistent.
• Combat Tentacles: How do you beat the tentacle monster in Resident Evil? Why, throw a Japanese schoolgirl at it, of course!
• Composite Character:
  • In the Harry Potter parody, George Yunohu (Tusseky in french) is Voldemort/Quirrell merged with Gilderoy Lockhart of all people.
  • According to the Behind the Scenes video, Texas Granger from the same aforementioned episode is supposed to be a mixture of Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, which would explain her Adaptational Dumbass.
  • For some reason, in the Robin Hood video, the Sheriff of Nottingham also takes up the role of Prince John.
  • In the RoboCop episode (the Mid-Review Sketch parodies the first film), Seb's character is a counterpart of both Bob Morton (as manager of the team turning Fred into a cyborg) and Dick Jones (as a corrupt businessman using the cyborg as a pawn in his plan).
• Content Warning: Subverted. In the Valentine's Day episode, JdG says that since they're about to discuss adult topics, the children watching this video have ten seconds to... go grab a beer, since he knows they won't leave no matter what he says.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The anti-sexist jokes counter from the Barbie (NES) review appears again in one scene in the Jurassic Park games review.
  • His duck weapons from the review of Batman & Robin returns for the intro of his short review video (the next one).
  • The salami from that latter video becomes his weapon for the Link: Faces of Evil review intro and ending.
  • In the RPGs review, when he's starting to play Drakkhen, at the moment the Infogram logo appears on screen... That moment is priceless but it also refers to his previous reviews of games made by Infogrames.
  • The Papy Grenier features items from the previously reviewed games (Pokéball, SimCity Commissar Cap, Frostmourne...) on the mantlepiece.
  • At the end of the Back to the Future II and III review, Grenier goes back in time to prevent himself from testing the games. As a result, he ends up testing My Little Pony on Game Boy Advance instead (the YouTube picture even shows that he is wearing the "good game" shirt). At the beginning of the following episode, he's shown reviewing (and praising) that same game with an idiot smile before coming to his senses.
  • In the opening of the DC Comics adaptations video, Duck-Man is fighting against Tintin and Spirou, which have both a video-game adaptation of their adventures reviewed by JdG (and made by the dreaded Infogrames).
  • The GTA San Andreas' Papy Grenier episode has Fred going to the hairdresser. The available haircuts are "Gelganech"^note planet refered in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones videos, "Papy Grenier", "Archibald Von Grenier"^note character from the Indiana Jones video, "Lolitler"^note character from the Ghostbusters video, and "Afro Grenier"^note a gag from the Superheroes special episode. Fred chooses the latter haircut (onscreen, it's the same wig).
  • In the beginning of the Tomb Raider episode, the flashback about the history of the MacGuffin is about its discovery by Archibald Von Grenier.
  • In the Silver Surfer review during the Comics' Videogame Part 2, to finish the game Fred summons a "Japanese" gamer he introduces as "Mr Nakajima", who angrily retorts he's a Frenchman named "François Lebreton". In the earlier episode Unsorted Japanese Games, the Super Monkey Daibouken review features the same actor as Kaoru Nakajima, one of this game's real-life developer.
• Cope by Pretending: David Goodenough's backstory is revealed in a bonus video: his carefree attitude comes from denial about his daughter's passing, and he is slowly losing everything because of it.
• Corner of Woe: In the first part of the Takeshi's Challenge review, after he sings karaoke to advance through the game and is told "That was shit. Get out of here."
• Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: Captain NordVPN, the Superman Captain Ersatz who stars in the NordVPN sponsorship ads. One ad in particular goes full '60s superhero PSA, including a military music and a freeze-frame with military salute and a wink.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Papy Grenier in the RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 episode, whose actions include randomly increasing prices, putting all the animals of the zoo in the same cage, or stuffing the fries with salt to make the customers thirsty. And shooting visitor's balloons so they'd have to buy new ones.
• Couch Gag: Referenced in the beginning of The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants video.
• Creator's Apathy: Occasionally used In-Universe.
  • David Goodenough is the lazy video-game developer, occasionally with disastrous consequences. His exploits include been involved in a nuclear explosion (no details given) and contributing to the The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 because of his poor job on the ET adaptation on the Atari 2600. The only commentary he makes about the quality of Daemon Summoner is "Hey, it's not so bad, and at least the box closes correctly."
  • The whole Mid-Review Sketch Show for the Daemon Summoner video imagines the creation of the game, with David Goodenough as the project manager, Jean-Michel Bruitages for the sound effects, a BDSM guy responsible for quality control (who seems delighted to find the game so awful), a drug-addicted accountant who oversees the development's budget (and dies from an overdose before the end), and a kindergarten class as the scriptwriter.
• Creepy Crossdresser: Alluded in the Links: Faces of Evil video about the ugliness of the animated cut-scenes, in which Seb mentions that a friendly female NPC actually looks like Jean-Marie Le Pen^note Former leader of the main far-right French political party, and father of its current leader disguised as a woman.
• Cringe Comedy: Crypto-Geek C@fe has Fred as a relentlessly optimistic yet hopelessly inept small business owner who keeps trying to see the positive side of his disastrous life (he invested in crypto-currencies that have yet to increase in value, clients keep leaving without paying, the computers keep catching fire...), with long, awkward pauses and side glances whenever he tries to put a positive spin on things. Several commentators compare it to The Office.
• Critical Encumbrance Failure: Mocked in the Papy Grenier episode about Skyrim, where the Dragonborn picks a flower... and falls backward, having exceeded his weight limit.
• Crossover:
  • The Infogrames studio musical sequence in the Disney video, which features several members of the Crossed team. Crossed is a series of Web videos dealing with films about video games (adaptations or films in which video games are the main theme, depending of the episode). Oh, and the animator of Crossed is Karim Debbache...
  • The Castlevania video's mid-review sketch is mostly based on, well, Castlevania, but also features Sadako among Dracula's guests at the party, and photographs of Dracula posing with Edward Cullen and Spike.
  • Fred, among many French Internet personalities, participated in the parody video "Le SAV d'Internet" by Cyprien.
• Crucified Hero Shot: In the RollerCoaster Tycoon special, Seb does this as Fred's helicopter comes crashing down on him.
• Cry Laughing: In the episode about simulators, Seb ends up testing Toilet Tycoon (which is, yes, a management game about building toilets).
  Seb: See? When you click on the menus, it makes a fart noise! Funny isn't it? Ha ha ha ha ha... uuuuh...
• Cultural Translation: Referred in the Last Battle video. It is supposed to be a Japanese video game based on the Fist of the North Star franchise and named Hokuto no Ken: Shin Seikimatsu Kyūseishu Densetsu. The game has been released in Europe and North America under the title Last Battle, with a lot of alteration in the dialogues and character names (and a few in their appearance), making it unrelated to its original material.
• Curse Cut Short: A few times, either by a transition to a different scene, or some other kind of censorship.
• Cut the Juice: Grenier pulls the plug of his NES in the Valentine's Day special when he learns that one of the games' title, "177", refers to the Japanese law against rape.
• Damned by Faint Praise: Grenier mentions that according to some, Super Hydlide is the best Hydlide game ever, which is like saying having a cancer is better than having AIDS.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Prince of Persia 2 requires first the jump button and then the direction you want to jump in.
  JdG: How are you supposed to forget in a few hours what took you ten years to learn?!
• Dance Party Ending: In the FPS episode, Doug Walker tells JdG it is time to DAAAAAANCE and they do this, with many guest stars (including Benzaie and Bob Lennon) on Will Smith's "Getting Jiggy with It".
• Darker and Edgier: During his girly cartoons review, he talks about My Little Pony: Battle for Ponyland, a grimdark movie based on My Little Pony featuring deaths and epic battles. Not.
• Dawson Casting: Invoked when mentioning the bad French dubbing in the intro to Blaze & Blade (known as Legend of Foresia in Europe). When a teenage girl starts speaking with the voice of a woman clearly more than twice her age, the message "Casting Error Detected" flashes on the screen.
• Dead Horse Trope: Fred claims that the show never did cliché "the developers were on drugs" jokes... at least not to the extent to which the genre is infamous for.
• Death Glare:
  • Seb gets his share of this whenever he's doing something that annoy Grenier.
  • In the superhero video, JdG does this to the audience while pondering why exactly a guy might slip drugs into his cousin's food. His blond, attractive, underage, female cousin.
• Deconstructive Parody: The JdG enjoys transposing video game clichés into real life.
  • In the Zelda-CDi video, he puts a bomb next to a cracked wall in his house, blows it up Zelda-style, and enters what appears to be a secret room...
    JdG: What is this place? There's a lot of stuff in here! A cellphone, a phone bill with my neighbor's name on it, a picture of my neighbor and his wife... where am I?
  • In the Papy Grenier video about Pokémon Red and Blue, he states that most of the NPCs who stand still outside die en masse when winter comes. He also notes that, during a duel between two Pokémon trainers, the winner takes the money of his opponent... he notes that this could be called "racketeering".
  • In the Papy Grenier video about SimCity, the transposition into reality of a way to play the game makes him (as the Mayor) acting as a Stalin-like dictator with supernatural powers who sometimes unleashes disasters on his town For the Evulz.
  • In the simulators video, during Seb's review of Toilet Tycoon, it is noted that the player can build golden or emerald toilet bowls with silk or mink fur toilet paper. Which leads to this sentence:
    JdG: Argh, it's cold... Ouch, I just cut myself with the emerald toilets! Yuck, the paper is full of hairs, it's gross!
  • Later in the same video, during the review of the ambulance simulator game, after noting that no matter how bad the player drives the ambulance, it doesn't affect the patient health:
    Seb: I just brought you a patient, he's suffering from several broken bones and a cerebral hemorrhage.
    JdG: What? He was supposed to just have an appendicitis!
  • The Papy Grenier episode about Zelda focuses on Link's strange behavior, and the negative effects it has on everybody's lives... except for the potter, whose business boomed ever since Link arrived in Hyrule.
  • The Resident Evil video may in fact have been Papy Grenier slaughtering his way through a big house filled with stoned hippies. Not that he cares.
  • In the sport cartoons video, JdG notices how the recurring and long flashback scenes during the soccer parts of Captain Tsubasa are distracting, by showing JdG (dressed as a soccer player) having a flashback while running... and eventually leaving the soccer field without noticing it.
  • In the second FAQ, JdG states that he stopped playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim before finishing it because his player character became too powerful and he finally got bored. He then states that after killing all those dragons and absorbing their souls, digesting dragon souls probably becomes painful. Cue a sequence with Seb dressed as Dovhakiin and slaying his 500^th dragon, then absorbing its soul... and becoming sick (complete with a distorted version of the game's main theme, while Seb is vomiting).
  • In the Final Fantasy VII themed Papy Grenier, he comments how dumb the "victory dance" concept is (at the end of the fights) by showing Cloud unintentionally beheading his squad-mates with his BFS while performing it.
  • In the beginning of the Mid-Review Sketch for Enter the Matrix, the characters' gaits when they leave the room has them awkwardly waddling with crumpled leather's noises, because the leather outfits are too tigh to allow them to walk normally.
• Delayed Reaction: In the Merchandise-Driven special, when reviewing Beyblade, Fred quickly mentions that a dragon comes out of the hero's spinning top, then moves on, describes a different scene for a minute... and only then realizes mid-sentence that a freaking dragon came out of the hero's top.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  Narrator: The Temple of Elder Sages, home of... the Elder Sages!
• Depth Perplexion: A common complaint of JdG for 2D games, with either background elements made to look like platforms, or platforms nonsensically hidden in the background. One section of Bart vs. the Space Mutants turned tricky because of this almost makes him quit in rage.
• Designated Hero:
  • The protagonist of the Fort Boyard: Legends point'n click is described as one In-Universe, since the goal is to claim a lost treasure of Fort Boyard (the player character is a former contestant who already won the game just before the story starts), and Fred points out that entering the Fort again to look for the treasure inside it is, technically, a burglary. Progression in the story requires to steal a golden coin belonging to a barman (said coin being a precious object from his family), then using a credit card forgotten by the former user of his hotel room to gain cash.
  • Laurent Croft from the Tomb Raider video is apparently infamous In-Universe, being mentioned by the news as having just plundered a child's graveyard, and being decribed by a talk-show guest as a so-called adventurer who never does adventuring. His butler also seems to deeply hate him.
• Designated Villain: Parodied in the intro of the Prince of Persia 2 and Alex Kidd in High Tech World review, where the real JdG is on vacation and got Dorian from 3615 Usul to replace him, both Fred and Seb go back home urgently after Dorian wonders why Nazis are always portrayed as villains while reviewing Wolfenstein 3-D.
• Destructive Saviour: At the end of the "RPG 3" video, the Sage congratulates the adventuring party on having completed the prophecy and saved the world... except the castle and the whole town are on fire.
• Didn't Think This Through: The ending of Castlevania. Yes Alucard, gloat about how you used the unhinged vampire hunter as your Unwitting Pawn while you know he's standing in the same room. No wonder Belmont stakes Alucard in the middle of his monologue...
• Diegetic Visual Effects: In the mid-review sketch of Ghostbusters, when the Ghostbusters investigate the haunted video game store and are greeted by supernatural-looking wind and light after opening the door of the storage room, it wasn't cause by a ghost or other supernatural phenomenon but by a (mundane and living) man who was holding a fan and a projector.
• Difficulty Spike: invoked Mentioned in the review of Beauty and the Beast in the Disney special. Grenier doubts that any of the little girls this game was aimed at were able to beat it at the time.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil:
  • Completely averted when he suggests people should try the game of the week no matter the means, even on an emulator, to see how bad it is.
  • Mocked on the Captain Planet and the Planeteers video review when it was not available on YouTube (this scene is absent from the official YouTube version, however):
    JdG: This video was made for the Pix'n'love magazine, and will probably be pirated and put on YouTube before the end of this very sentence.
    [someone off-screen reloads a gun]
    JdG: [looking off-screen] What? What did I say?
  • And again, at the beginning of his Heavy Nova review, as soon as he mentions the video is DVD-exclusive, Seb says "Too late", the camera pans out, and the video is in fact on YouTube uploaded by someone else, causing JdG to exclaim "What?! Already?!"
  • A more discreet (and maybe unintentional) aversion: when he plays My Little Pony (GBA) on his Nintendo DS, it has a flashcart plugged in.
• Dirty Old Man: The Greybeard (played by Seb) in the second RPG review is first seen in a strip club, and then reading porn mags.
• Discredited Meme: Invoked in the "Papy Grenier" episode about the SimCity game. He starts doing a Hitler Rants parody video... but the scene is cut short by the children, who quickly comment that this scene has been parodied too many times, and that he isn't allowed to use it anymore.
• Discriminate and Switch: One of the ways he likes to dodge racist/sexist jokes, such as in the X-Perts episode.
  JdG: And come on, she should know how to use a vacuum cleaner! ...She's an engineer.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • In Fallout 3, Papy Grenier decided to nuke a city because he couldn't kill the children in it.
  • In Castlevania, Belmont slaughtered Dracula and his guests because he's their neighbour and their party's music was too loud.
• Dissimile: In the Waterworld review.
  JdG: It kind of looks like Desert Strike, except you control a trimaran instead of a helicopter and you shoot jet-skis instead of Iraqi soldiers... yeah, it's nothing like Desert Strike actually.
• Dodgy Toupee: Fred and Seb's different characters often appear in wigs that make no attempt to match up with their facial hair. "Carol from marketing" in particular has hair the color of a traffic cone.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: In the Civ 5 LP, Germany is devastated by an extremely rapid surprise French attack.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: The Mission: Impossible Mid-Review Sketch Show is a Mission: Impossible parody where Fred is a spy looking for data about the identity of a mole. The mole is Seb, who's previously shown as Fred's Mission Control.
• Domestic Abuse: Played for Laughs.
  • According to the FAQ, the child who plays young Fred is kept in a closet when not being filmed.
  • Takeshi's Challenge has a sequence where the player character beats up his wife and children. Fred acts this out with gusto.
    JdG: Die, you fucking genetic mistake!
  • During the Jeux en Vrac special on Creatures 2, the male creature keeps slapping the female as soon as she's created. Cue Fred in a trucker hat holding a beer.
    JdG: Yeah, that's how you educa— [JOKE ABORTED]

  Later the creature gets pregnant... doesn't stop the male from slapping her around.

• Don't Explain the Joke: An extended joke starting with the Amélie Poulain: Montmartre Killing Spree gag. Seb butts (huhu) in to say "So you could say she's hilling in Montmartre!" which he elaborates on at the end of the video (Butte, hill; Bute, kill; Amélie Poulain: Montmartre Hilling Spree).
• Dope Slap: Fred slaps the Old Sage towards the end of his first RPG review when he rewards his "quest" with a mundane hammer.
• Double Entendre: Apparently, the reason there isn't a Marsupilami review is because it would be impossible to avoid these with the Marsupilami's long tail ("tail" being a colloquialism for "penis" in French).
• Double Standard: As pointed out in the Olsen twins games, teenaged girls following teenaged boys all day and secretly taking pictures with them only works for teenaged girls (cut to Fred approaching young women offscreen, then cut to Fred's mugshots).
• Downer Ending:
  • The ending of the Ghostbusters episode spoofs the original movie's, the JdG and the other Ghostbusters crosses the streams in a attempt to defeat a giant Lolhitler, except they end up blowing up the entire planet by doing so.
  • The Fort Boyard episode ends with the show host stealing all the golden coins amassed by the contestants, leaves on a boat and the contestants are left stuck on the fort.
• The Dreaded: Infogrames, a French developer notorious for its (sometimes genuinely good) adaptations of Franco-Belgian Comics, and for the ridiculous difficulty of these adaptations. There is even a jingle for Infogrames games now (on the tune of Patrick Sébastien's "Le Petit Bonhomme en mousse").
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: In the GIGN Anti-Terror Force review, JdG impersonates one, chewing out a soldier (Seb) for... not recycling properly. (The game translated whatever term was used for the tutorial as "Recycling lesson".)
  Sarge JdG: Well, my little toilet nugget, how many times do I have to tell you that paper and plastic do NOT go in the non-recycling bin?! Your mother must be dying of shame, you beta-tester of Carambar jokes!
• Drinking Game: Attempts to do one with the following rules: pick a random video game and take a shot for every outright lie on the cover box. He gets Rise of the Robots. He has to take out several more bottles.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • During the girly shows special, after witnessing footage of Ai Shite Night. Not the anime, but the diabetes-inducing Italian live series.
    [splashes gasoline all over himself and takes a matchbox]
    Seb: Wait, don't you have other series to review?
    JdG: What's next?
    Seb: Err... I think it's Lady Georgie.
    [JdG frantically starts to strike the match]
  • Some way into The Legend of Zelda: Faces of Evil, Grenier idly ponders what Nintendo could have thought of this game. Cue a clip of a samurai committing Seppuku.
  • In the Batman: The Movie review, after the "porpoise incident" (and a long series of Beats), the scriptwriter (Seb) shoots himself in the mouth.
• Drop-In Nemesis: In a parody of the unpredictable Game Overs in Alex Kidd in High-Tech World, clicking on a flowerpot causes Alex Kidd to be run over by a TGV.
• Drugs Are Bad: Raid 2020 is supposed to be a game with an anti-drug message. The problem is that the setting is so confusing and incoherent that the Joueur du Grenier wonders if the developers were high when creating it.
• Dude, Not Funny!: Several racier or line-crossing jokes are interrupted just before the punchline.
• Dumb Blonde:
  • During the "Girly Cartoons" video, when the heroine of Georgie! tries to chat with a couple of koalas and gets angry because they don't answer, the JdG refers to the trope.
    JdG: They. Are. Koalas! They can't speak, you... blonde!
  • Exaggerated in the Detective Barbie video, where Barbie has no clue what to do with a foot-wide thumbprint and a bag of fingerprint powder.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Earliest episodes had no intro, very few sketches involving special effects (except for the parts where JdG destroys games) and Seb was mostly silent (and when he talked, he had his regular voice). AVGN-inspired elements were also much more pronounced, with JdG being angrier, often sporting the same angry expression as the AVGN, and finished most episodes by destroying the game(s) he reviewed.
  • During the first few episodes, there was an open laptop on the small table in front of the JdG. Fred himself later admitted he had no idea why it was there, since he never even used it to look up the script because it was too noisy to keep on during filming.
  • Those early episodes often referenced events that happened in older ones, in order to establish some kind of solid continuity. Fred decided to give up on this, as most viewers wouldn't necessarily view them in order.
  • The early episodes/seasons were openly aimed at an audience that was of Fred's generation, and so he made a lot of sincere nostalgic references to '80s/'90s French kids. In later seasons, he obviously aims for a Younger and Hipper audience and when he makes this kind of reference — that has now become less frequent — it would usually be done with sarcasm and self-depreciation.
  • When Jean-Michel Bruitage first appeared, he kept his eyes open and was slightly expressive. Later on, he'd have his Eyes Always Shut and be The Stoic.
• Ear Worm:
  • Some of the music tracks in the games he reviewed, most particularly the theme of Dragon Ball for the NES (its European version, to be precise) are those. He even shows how this theme will never leave your brain.
  • When reviewing The Addams Family (NES), he notices that the only music track of the game is a 8-bit fex seconds loop of the series' theme. To show how it is annoying, he uses a short loop of the Joueur du Grenier opening theme during the following minute.
  • Splinter's mangling of the "Twelve Days of Christmas" gets to him so bad he believes it's fused with his DNA.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Finishing Pugsley Scavenger Hunt in a low difficulty level grants a A Winner Is You ending suggesting to beat the game in a higher difficulty mode. The true ending is also A Winner Is You, with a different short text.
• Eat the Bomb: In Taz-Mania, Taz automatically eats any interactive object he steps on, including bombs (it hurts him but is not an insta-kill). What annoys JdG is where the developers chose to put the bombs: behind pillars and right where you're expected to land when jumping (not unlike the invisible coin blocks in Platform Hell games).
• The Elevator from Ipanema: In the review of X-Perts, this classic elevator muzak is used when JdG points out that, unlike in many other games, you have to wait for an elevator to show up.
• Epic Fail: In the "Shitty Games Tier List" video, this is what it takes for a game to earn the "Divine Purge" category. Not only it must fail as a game, but it must fail in a truly grandiose fashion, where not a single stone is left unfailed.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Played for Laughs In-Universe at the end of the third RPG special where the old sage says that "The world is finally at peace", only for the camera to step back to show that the castle, the village and the forest around the heroes are on fire.
• Establishing Character Moment: The first appearance of The Movies Let's Play is director Hugues-Ferdinand Margoulin ^note  antiquated French slang for a Crooked Contractor or conman laughing at the women waiting in line.
  Title Card: Ha ha! Women who want to work!
  Title card: Why not give them voting rights while we're at it?
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • In the Comics Games #1 special, when Night Eagle and Duckman escape their way out of a laser tag labyrinth, they mistake the children playing for mooks, and so violently attacks them, a bewildered Riddler berates them for that on the speakers.
  • Spoofed in the Castlevania video. One of the guest attending Dracula's party is the (non-undead) deputy CEO of Nestlé and The vampires are very uncomfortable around her.
• Every Episode Ending:
  • In earlier episodes, episodes usually ended in one of three manners:
    • JdG destroyed the game (sometimes in a manner reminiscent to the episode's theme), like the AVGN often does.
    • JdG just got rid of the game in other ways (throwing it in the trash, ditching it out of the window of his car, leaving with it to destinations unknown...).
    • JdG experienced a supernatural side-effect of playing the game or finishing it, cutting his review short.
  • The Papy Grenier episodes always have one of the kids saying "But Grandpa, that's not a story, that's a video game!" at the end.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • When the third Ninja Turtles movie dub uses casual racist jokes, one shocks Grenier as even he wouldn't have made it. Subverted: he commented in a later video that not only he would have made that joke, he would actually have made worse.
    Michaelangelo: That was your worst mistake, Nagasaki!
  • The Head doctor in Code Bleu is an alcoholic, fairly apathetic toward his job, dismissive of his employees, etc., but even he doesn't like how much their insurance company end up leading the hospital.
    Head Doctor: This isn't an ad studio, it's an hospital.
    Accountant: Stop it, you're scaring our clients.
    Head Doctor: They aren't clients, they're patients.
• Everything Trying to Kill You:
  • Tintin in Tibet, most egregiously in the hotel (level 3) where you could be killed by Pekingese dogs, maids with vacuum cleaners, toppled suitcases, waiters with a platter full of goods...
  • Later topped by Home Alone 2's plaza hotel, where the staff and guests are actively trying to murder you.
  • Worse: In a level of Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun, your mission during an entire level is to avoid a single suitcase while you're in a train car. Easier said than done.
  • The hoverboard levels in the second Back to the Future Sega Master System game. Hitting any person, dog or sidewalk edge makes the hero lose a life.
  • The Smurfs (by the same people as the two Tintin games mentioned above) features not only Black Smurfs, zombifying flies, ghosts, etc., as enemies, but also rabbits, hurting leaves (yes, leaves), falling apples, unkillable butterflies, and lightning bolts randomly falling from the sky.
  • In Alex Kidd in High Tech World, JdG complains that turning a computer on or wearing a suit of armor triggers a Non-Standard Game Over. He then says that it is absolutely too random to be discovered by another way than Trial-and-Error Gameplay, while the video shows a poorly edited sequence of the game in which Alex Kidd is smashed by a train because he touched a flower pot.
• Evil Old Folks: Papy Grenier.invoked He tells his grandchildren that he tried to convince their mother to abort while she was pregnant with them, he once shot one of the kids to prove a point, he hit another for being a smartass and he apparently keeps the skull of... ''someone'' with him. And that's not counting the stuff happening in his stories, which may or may not be real.
  Papy Grenier: I ever tell you about the one time I killed a kid and buried his corpse in the backyard?
• Eyepatch After Time Skip: In the Terminator episode, Seb as a "Future Resistance Leader" is wearing an eyepatch.
• Facepalm:
  • Just check out the YouTube thumbnails. A facepalm ends each intro sequence, just before the title.
  • In the Color Dreams video (during the Raid 2020 part), he does a facepalm while wearing a giant Mickey Mouse-style glove.
  • At the end of the second special (about cartoons), the completely over-the-top scene from The Prince of Tennis elicits one.
  • In the 2^nd FAQ video, Seb facepalms while JdG is trying to show the audience the camera used to film... with the camera used to film.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: For "Des Jeux et du Métal !", the group Wet Fingers dramatically prepare for an epic Battle of the Bands against Fred and Seb, with apropos musical cue... except the mic technician takes his sweet time setting up the microphone and doing some sound testing with it, bringing the moment to a screeching halt.
• Fan Myopia:invoked Played for Laughs when Fred talks about Duke Nukem Forever's Troubled Production, notably how Technology Marches On, with lead developper George Broussard constantly asking the game to be remade when a newer engine came out and to add features he saw in other properties as time went on. Seb unwisely says it reminds him of Fred's Sacred Cow Star Citizen. Cut to Fred holding a very large shotgun and daring Seb to finish his sentence.
• Fanon Discontinuity: In-Universe:
  • In the Dragon Ball video:
    JdG: And there's nothing after Dragon Ball Z. NOTHING!!"
  • In the Instruments of Chaos video, he angrily says that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn't part of the Indiana Jones franchise.
• Fanservice: Both videos with Doug Walker in them have him in leather and uniform. Girls and queer guys went nuts.
• Fan Vid: He is sick of AMVs with Evanescence and Linkin Park music.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: Invoked at the end of the second RPG episode. Grenier ("Swearborn") and Bob Lennon are the fighters, Seb (as a Greybeard) is the mage, and Karim Debbache is the thief.
  Karim: Wait a minute, why am I the th... [beat] Okay, you know what, go fuck yourselves.
• Filler:
  • He explicitly states that some sections of the Excalibur 2555 A.D test are intentionally this, because each second of filler is a second not spent playing this game.
  • Invoked, and lampshaded in the intro of the Silent Assault / Raid 2020:
    Narrator: And now, like in all the series after a big cliffhanger, here is... a filler episode!
    [a view of Seb and JdG looking at the camera]
    Seb: Er... what's a filler?
    JdG: It's when you make a big cliffhanger but haven't planned what to do next.
  • According to him, the LOTR game has more filler in the opening sequence than Naruto.
• Finger Gun: In Takeshi's Challenge part 2, JdG fires on the space octopus with his finger. Then after an Aside Glance, he states: "It's a manga. I do whatever I want."
• Fingore: During the opening of the bad DC Comics adaptations video, Joker-Seb cuts (offscreen) the fingers of the videotester Marcus and replace them with sausages.
• Fireball Eyeballs: In the Dragon's Lair review, when JdG has had enough and asks for the game's password, Seb protests that it's way too soon. Cue Grenier glaring at the camera with fire in the eyes and demanding again for the password in a very deep voice.
• Firing One-Handed: The character of Trespasser uses only one hand to do anything, including firing handguns or rifles, but also carrying heavy objects like rocks or iron bars.
• Flanderization: Fred as the Swearborn was able to make normal sentences in the RPG videos, but only speaks in swear words in the 11-year videos (outside of game reviews, at least). Word of God mentions this was intentionally done because the character was otherwise uninteresting.
• Flashback... Back... Back...: Lampshaded in the Spirou review.
• Flashback Echo: The Tibet level of Instruments of Chaos makes Grenier have one of his Tintin in Tibet test, as if he was a Shell-Shocked Veteran traumatized by it.
• Flashback Effects: Lampshaded in the Smurfs review, with the therapist pondering why his sight is getting blurred, and JdG explaining that it's just a flashback.
• Flat Character: By Fred's own admission, the Child of Juron from the RPG videos is nothing more than a Sir Swears-a-Lot with barely any Character Development, and who actually doesn't contribute much to the plot.
• Flat Joy:
  • In the review of Terminator on NES, describing how hectic and exciting the game is.
    JdG: I hit, hit, hit, duck. Hit, hit, hit, duck. Hit, hit... I won. Yaaaaaay.
  • The Roller Coaster Tycoon special has his first ride, an oval with a slightly raised portion of the track, garner this reaction from visitors. So he improves it by adding a death metal soundtrack.
• Flipping the Bird: Grenier's conclusion of his X-Perts testing? Giving the finger to the makers of the game. And then, in a scene reminiscent of the early days of Joueur du Grenier, he destroys the game cartridge by firing an energy beam from his raised middle finger.
• Flipping the Table: In the Platoon and Metal Gear review, after he realizes that his attempt to make a map of the first area of Platoon failed.
• Follow the Leader:invoked AVGN, which he admits.
  JdG: The concept was taken from AVGN (long live the King!) and adapted in French. If you know a bit of English, I recommend you check him out.
• Formerly Fat: Fred lost some weight in 2013^note in a 2020 interview, he estimates he lost about 60 kilograms in two years, the "boring FAQ" says this was for health reasons (compare the earlier logo◊). Curiously, this coincides with a change of tone in the latest videos, where he looks and sound more frowning and blasé, and generally meaner. In the October 2018 FAQ, after being asked about the wedding ring he started to wear since a couple of month ago, after answering the question, Fred added he was wondering if in FAQs "hey! you have a wedding ring now" isn't going to become the new "hey! you lost weight!" he was asked often. He also pointed that, by now, he has been Formerly Fat in the series for longer than he was actually fat.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: In Harry Potter, Fred keeps his costume from the mid-review sketch sequences (a Hogwart student uniform) during the proper review parts set in the usual couch room, instead of wearing the iconic yellow Hawaiian shirt.
• For the Evulz: The reason why the Mayor of SimCity unleashes disasters on his town, from time to time.
• For Want Of A Nail: Fred and Seb planned the show together and apparently didn't decide who would be the Attic Gamer until they started shooting. Fred only went in because Seb didn't feel as confident in front of the camera.
  Fred: There's another timeline out there in which Seb is wearing the yellow shirt and I'm Fred the cameraman.
• Fourth-Wall Mail Slot: "JdG answers your questions"... well, at least it was the starting idea.
• Framing Device:
  • In the TMNT specials, the whole review is an eulogy pronounced during the funerals of the TMNT franchise.
  • In the first FMV episode, the review itself is inside a Joueur du Grenier-themed FMV game developped by Mauvais Jeux, Inc. and played by Fred.
  • In "Wii Games for Girls", the core of the video consists in Fred and Seb watching a Gender-Flipped version of the show thanks to a "VPN" allowing to access alternate universes' versions of Youtube (the pretext for the reviews is the girls playing video games at a slumber party).
• Franchise Killer: invoked
  • When reviewing them, he mentions that Bubsy 3D and Virtual Hydlide killed their own franchise.
  • The Framing Device of the Turtles review is an extended gag with an elaborate funeral including a funeral pyre, bagpipes and Amazing Freaking Grace (and apparently Fred booked the Patrouille de France) for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, killed by bad adaptations.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • At the start of the Home Alone review, JdG looks at something on the right page of his notebook, which is centered on the screen. If you look at the left page, it's written "Plagiarize the AVGN"^note A nod to Mike Matei's accusation of JdG being a copycat of James and "Kill Antoine Daniel".
  • Whenever you see Unreadably Fast Text slipping by, you can expect to see a joke in there, like random names (existing or not), or sentences along the line of "Don't you have anything better to do than to pause the video to read this?"
  • The Nightmare Circus one comments that your eyes must hurt like hell.
  • The video on getting a tax cut on charitable donations has an inbox filled with porn site spam.
• Funny Afro: JdG has an afro haircut in the parodic '60s-themed intro in the Superheroes special.
• Funny Background Event: When phoning the ancient sage in the RPG episode, we see the others dancing in the background.
• Fun with Acronyms: At the beginning of the 11th Anniversary episode, Duck-Man meets with Commissaire Magret and other members of the C.C.P.D. — "Canard City Police Department". Except that, "C.C.P.D." sounds phonetically like the French for "That's those faggots." To further the gag, their is some Stripper/Cop Confusion going in the background.
• Fun with Homophones: In the Valentine's Day episode. "Warning. This video is potentially dirty, we advise minors to not watch it." Cut to a bunch of miners (played by Seb) complaining. (In French, "minor" and "miner" are the same word.)
• Fun with Subtitles: The making-of video for the third RPG special introduces Fred as a freelance Greco-Roman wrestler and Seb as the 1999 Pogs champion for the Roussillon region.
• Gag Censor: Low-quality looping gifs are used to block out offensive content, such as bearded old men dancing rhythmically or Carol from marketing (Fred in a wig).
• Gag Dub: Does this to a few games to accentuate the points he makes. There's a particularly funny one during his Spirou review, when he thinks that main characters in games made by Infogrames all seem to have agoraphobia, and illustrates his point by dubbing over a level from a Tintin game, where the latter is running through a crowded museum (where the goal is to avoid touching people):
  JdG as Tintin: Oh Lord, where on Earth am I, oh God, look at this, there's even a man with a beard [touches said man, gets hit] ouch, get out of my way, Osama, I don't want to get close to you, oh what a horror this is, you all make me sick!
• Gainax Ending:
  • Some of the episodes end like this, especially the Young Indiana Jones one (Grenier's grandpa actually is an alien which needed the test to go home). This ending itself makes sense if you consider that this also is a reference to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
  • Nightmare Circus ends with Seb fleeing from a demonically possessed Fred and a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl played by Benzaie (really), enters a forest cabin which happens to be Santa's house, then Benzaie and Fred (who is no longer possessed) follow him inside. Then everyone headbangs on a metal cover of "Silent Night".^note According to Word of God, the ending was supposed to be a less silly horror parody, but they didn't know how to finish the episode
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • In Instruments of Chaos, at the end of each stage you have exactly one chance to beat a boss in order to prevent a Mad Scientist to give a weapon to the German (which equip a Zeppelin serving as the final boss); failure doesn't trigger a Game Over and allows to continue the game. JdG initially thinks that, depending on the bosses you actually beats and those you failed to beat, the final boss' power would change. It actually doesn't alter anything, the zeppelin always has all of the weapons.
  • When reviewing the PC adaptation of Ghostbusters II, Fred notices the game features sequences where failure sends the current player character to the asylum, which in-game results in a screen of a newspaper featuring Winston's mugshot, regardless of the Ghostbusters' member who has actually been arrested.
  • ER has a NPC praising the player character's skill in emergency medicine, at the exact time one of the latter's patients is dying onscreen.
• Gender Flip:
  • In the parody skits during the Ghostbusters video, a male video game store worker (played by Sad Panda) serves as the counterpart of Dana Barrett.
  • Papy Grenier's Resident Evil episode replaces Jill Valentine with "Gilles Valentin", played of course by Seb.
  • In the narrative parts of the Tomb Raider video, Fred's character stands for Lara Croft. He is named "Laurent Croft" (Laurent is a French male given name, equivalent to "Lawrence") and sports Lara's iconic haircut. (The video also contains several short gags mocking flaws of the Tomb Raider franchise, in which Lara is played by a female extra.)
• Gender-Bent Alternate Universe: The Mid-Review Sketch of "Wii Games for Girls" is about Seb using a "VPN" to access alternate universe versions of Youtube, and finding one where the Joueur du Grenier show exists but Fred and Seb's counterparts are women (the opening credit is a careful recreation of the original one where Fred is replaced by the actress and the "one, two, three, four" vocals are pronounced by a woman).
• Generation Xerox: In order to explain Papy Grenier reminiscing about Mass Effect as a game he played in his youth, his grandkids have all grown up and are using him to babysit their own children, who have the same high-pitched voices. He even asks the kids to refer to him as Grandpa instead of Great-Grandpa to make the following videos easier.
• Genre Savvy:
  • The intro of the Heavy Nova video has Fred explaining that it's a DVD exclusive, before Seb tells him it's too late and the camera pans out to show the video already on YouTube. Sadly, the actual uploader did not use the same title as the video.
  • In a much later video, he revisits games he's already reviewed. When Heavy Nova comes up, he mentions that it was a DVD exclusive, so naturally you already saw it on YouTube.
• Girls with Moustaches: One of the bit characters in Daemon Summoner is Fred disguised as a female accountant, still sporting his usual stubble. She continues to make appearance, especially in streams as a gif or as a Gag Censor.
• Glad I Thought of It: It takes a while for Fred to get the idea that a roller coaster game should feature, y'know, roller coasters (up to then, his park contained: a road, a burger stand, a mascot... and that's it).
• Goddamned Bats:invoked A major pain in the ass in most of the platform games he reviews.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: After a long series of murders, bribes, and political machinations (but mostly murders), Camille Silverberg becomes queen (well, sovereign) of Lyon in the Guild 2 LP.
• Godwin's Law:
  • He introduces Airwolf on Amstrad CPC thusly:
    JdG: Let's just say that if Hitler were a video game developer, he would have participated in making this game.
  • The opening of the Dragon's Lair video shows a few historical pictures, including one of Hitler holding a cart of the game.
  • Right at the beginning of the Fantasia review:
    JdG: I'll say it right away, this game equals nazi! [cue Godwin point logo appearing] Now that this is out of the way, I can proceed.
• Grammar Correction Gag: Seb as the Colonel, in the Platoon / Metal Gear review, complains that the ransom note he's forced to read is badly written.
• Gratuitous Greek: There are two alien characters named Alpha V (five) de Gelganech and Omega 3.
• Gratuitous Japanese:
  • The Takeshi's Challenge intro.
  • Despite his French name, Jean-Michel Bruitages speaks Japanese — though it is mostly undecipherable because it is dubbed over.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: House Xboxrin acts as The Cavalry at the end of the Harry Potter review, having been investigating Yunohu for months. Several of them were even killed in the process.
• Green Aesop: The Waterworld review ends with his throwing the game into the ocean where a sperm whale chokes on it. An oceanologist's letter is then read on the news, asking people to "stop throwing your fucking trash in the ocean, goddammit!"
• Groin Attack: In the Sword of Sodan video. The more practical way to dogde enemy attacks is to fight while crouching. On the screen, it looks like the player character is repeatedly stabbing them in the testicles.
• Grotesque Gallery:
  • JdG finds Téléchat creepy. Which is understandable, considering that many items in the show have an unsettlingly human face (most notably a clothes iron, a phone and a microphone).
  • The faces of the characters in the Robin Hood NES game are either terrifying or random (Robin looks like David Hasselhoff, Guy de Gisborne looks like Chuck Norris, Friar Tuck seems to be wearing a Michael Myers mask...
    Friar Tuck: I'm going to eat your skin~~
• Gruesome Grandparent: Papy Grenier likes to tell morbid things to his grandkids, like when he mentioned he has a kid buried in his garden and how he tried to convince their mother to have an abortion, he also even once shot one of them with a pistol just to see what sound one makes when they get shot.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: An explanation is offered for the GoldenEye guards: they're just going along with a guard's friend's fantasy that he's a secret agent.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • JdG gets stuck at the beginning of the last level in Astérix and the Great Rescue. The way to get past the wall is quite wall-banging, indeed.
  • The enigmas in Excalibur 2555 A.D. are non-logical, meaning if a single little item is missing or you don't know its use, you can't finish a level. And some of them require combining items.
  • This happens to him a lot because in a lot of retro games, most of the plot was explained in the manual, but since he lost/lacks the manual for most of his games and the games themselves rarely give any indication as to what the player is supposed to do...
  • It gets particularly bad in the first level of Platoon on NES, where you must find your way in a forest where every screen is nearly identical, and there is absolutely no indication on which way you're supposed to go. The actual path is so complicated that it's impossible to find it without a guide.
  • Alex Kidd in High Tech World seemed especially infamous to him. For example, the last Plot Coupon of the first level is hidden in one of the clocks hanging from the ceiling in each floor of the castle. Also, the third level (in which Alex Kidd must find a way to receive a coupon to enter an arcade game room) features two seemingly coherent way (by speaking to several NPCs to acquire items), but both eventually trigger a Non-Standard Game Over when the coupon is given to the guard at the end of the level. The correct way to receive the coupon is to pray one hundred times in the village temple.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: After Seb fires a revolver during the second "Off-topic: Advertisements 2" video, the sound of a casing being ejected and hitting the floor can be heard, even though revolvers do not eject cartridges.
• Gushing About Shows You Like: In-universe. He's a huge fan of Dragon Ball and Jurassic Park.
  JdG: Dragon Ball's universe, is just the most awesome thing ever created!
  
  JdG: Jurassic Park is my favorite movie. I saw it so many times I could recite the whole script from memory!
  
  JdG: When you buy a Jurassic Park game, you expect some quality, since it's the best movie ever.
• HA HA HA—No: Does this, twice, to the idea of getting a new title sequence in the Cool World video.
• Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Invoked in the Disney games review, where he mentions that if you're a duck, it's OK to go around with your ass showing.
• Hawaiian-Shirted Tourist: JdG's Iconic Outfit: a yellow Hawaiian shirt, shorts, socks and sandals. It becomes blue-white when he talks about TV-movie content.
• Head Desk:
  • In the SNES Dragon's Lair test:
    JdG: Let's call this level "THUD". Why level "THUD"? Because at the end, when you play it, you're like "THUD".
  • At the beginning of the tests for the adaptations of Hook and Beetlejuice, from dying during the first few seconds of play.
  • At the end of the Captain America special, Fred repeatedly bashes his head against the star-spangled shield in reaction to the idiocy of the 1990 movie.
• Head-Tiltingly Kinky: In Papy Grenier, the Resident Evil episode, Seb/Gilles tilts his head just after Chris throws a Japanese schoolgirl toward the tentacle monster to distract it.
• Hearing Voices: Papy Grenier has started hearing voices in his head. They claim to be here to avoid him turning mad, although it's probably too late for that. At least they catch him in time before he'd reveal his Retired Monster past.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": Inevitably pops up whenever consoles are discussed, since "bits" is pronounced the same as "bites" (dicks).
• Hell Hole Prison: Averted in "El Presidente". The president takes the Geneva convention seriously so he doesn't torture prisoners of war and even offers one his famous smoothie.
• Hell Is That Noise: In-universe, the Critical Annoyance in the infamous Ninja Turtle NES game has this effect on him... and on everyone who ever played the game.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Abused in the RCT special, where the employees are renamed "Asshole", "Myballs" and "Myass" by Fred.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Mocked in the Jurassic Park Genesis video, comparing it to a rhinoceros on the loose.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • The only way to describe JdG's reaction at the end of the Instrument of Chaos review, when he discovers that his grandfather Archibald Von GreNier is in fact AVGN... that is, an alien unrelated to the plot, in a parody of the ending of the fourth Indiana Jones movie. He just stay frozen on the spot with a shocked expression, all the way to the end credits.
  • The stupider moments in the TMNT video cause him to black out with his eyes still open.
• Hero of Another Story: In the Robin Hood special, one game features Friar Tuck. Who, while Robin and friends are off fighting the Sheriff, is throwing fireballs at skeletons, fighting Lucifer himself and closing hellgates.
• Hilarious Outtakes:
  • Most of his specials about cartoons end with these.
  • As well as The Addams Family games review, to apologize for a two-month hiatus.
  • The second FAQ video ends, at first, with obviously fake Hilarious Outtakes, then segues into real ones.
• His Name Is...: This trope is one of many clichés in Lady Georgie which caused him much frustration when he watched the series.
  JdG: Aaaargh, come on! We all know he's gonna kick it before he can tell the name, so stop dragging the scene on like that!
• Hitbox Dissonance:
  • Segues into a LARP scene in LOTR, where he demonstrates the difficulty of seven people killing a snake.
  • Instruments of Chaos is particularly noteworthy, since only the very tip of Young Indiana Jones' whip actually does damage.
• Hitodama Light: In "JdG answers your questions", when seen through the "specs that reveals souls", JdG has a black shirt and is surrounded by blue flames, as a result of testing the Spirou game.
• Hollywood Board Games: JdG's donation tiers for the Z Event 2020 are titled "JdG goes to the zoo with the Pictionary streamers" as a way to mock everyone's, himself included, ability to draw and recognize animals. Apparently, video gaming doesn't bode well with knowledge of the natural world.
• Hollywood Darkness: The beginning of Papy Grenier's story about Resident Evil.
• Hollywood Homely: Ygor in the Castlevania video, who films the party for his boss Dracula, has a Gollum-like voice and all the guests make a disgusted face when they see him. When he drops the camera, he is revealed to be a Pretty Boy with fluffy hair and a rolled-up shirt.
• Homoerotic Subtext:
  • What he points about the heroes of Street Fighter the animated series.
  • He also makes several jokes about Robin being gay during his review of Batman: The Movie.
  • His December 2017 review of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe points out the series' own shitloads of homoerotic subtext.
  • In a 2018 FAQ, one question is about Fred wearing a wedding ring. Fred starts by jokingly answering Seb and him are indeed now married.
• Horrifying the Horror: Played for Laughs with a side of Take That! in the Castlevania video. At Dracula's party, a vampire ends up meeting a being even undead find too much for them.
  Vampire: What kind of monster are you?
  Human Woman: [cheerfully] I'm the Deputy CEO of Nestlé.
  Vampire: [backs away and scrams in revulsion] Oh fuck!
• Hostile Show Takeover: Alice from the Resident Evil movies is so overpowered, she steals the conclusion of the Resident Evil movies' special from Grenier to shill herself, and gets angry when Grenier re-appears on the camera.
• Humongous Mecha: Used by Grenier in the end of the Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue to fight the cart of the game.
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: In the Cool World review, when trying to explain to a kid that the female lead is, ah, wet, he invents all sorts of weird expressions, putting on his best south-western accent.
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • Commissaire Magret in the Comics video cannot open his mouth without blurting out a dozen bird puns. Even his name is a pun on Commissaire Maigret, an old French crime procedural ("magret" is French for duck breast filet).
  • The Miami Vice video is peppered with and ends with horrible puns, visual and otherwise.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • At the beginning of the Sports Games Review, Grenier doesn't even wait for his mysterious caller to tell him something to do.
    JdG: What? You want me to play some awful old sports games? Ooooh noooo... [leaves the phone and rushes to the games]
  • During the Taz-Mania review:
    JdG: Ha ha ha... You're laughing, aren't you? Have you no shame? Seriously, haven't you noticed something shocking in this series? Taz's family can speak perfectly: his parents, his sister, his brother. They even wear clothes. And look at Taz... Look at him. [the picture turns in black and white with a sad music] He is the only one to always be naked and not to be able to speak. It's true, Taz is mentally disabled. So, stop making fun of him because... ha ha ha, this sod is funny!
  • During the Platoon review, when he reaches the civilian village:
    JdG: After several hours, I eventually discovered the way to the village. The morale meter is used there, because when you kill innocent villagers, you understand that our morale decreases. Because we, Americans, we are here to protect populations.

  We immediately see the Rambo-disguised Joueur du Grenier posing for a photograph reenacting one from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal of the Iraq War.

  • During the Pokémon video:
    Papy Grenier: I don't understand this issue, all these people saying that we didn't take care our Pokémon, it is not true, it is totally wrong! [...] We brought them to the hospital thirty times per day. If that's not taking care of them...
  • During the Superheroes special, he rants about Captain Planet and its Green Aesop, saying we don't need that to be environmentally responsible. And then he blows his nose with leopard skin.
  • And later, commenting about Captain Planet's Very Special Episode:
    JdG: And because of drugs, he now wears sunglasses and a skull-adorned T-shirt!
    Seb: [wearing sunglasses and a skull-adorned T-shirt] This disgusts me...
  • During the Kasumi Ninja review, he complains about the exaggerated Asian-sounding accent of the in-game voice:
    JdG: It's just shameful. We would never use such clichés in our show.
    [cue a montage of all the Asian-themed racist jokes appearing in the previous Joueur du Grenier episodes]
  • During the Instruments of Chaos review:
    JdG: Everybody knows that Egyptians in the twentieth century dress like the pharaohs. People who make such stereotypes annoy me.
    [cue Seb as a stereotypical Peruvian]
  • During a segment about a video game show hosted by a CGI woman with enormous tits and a painted-on outfit, Fred claims such a representation is degrading towards women as a whole. When the game starts, he says "Go back to the tits!"
  • In the second Comics-inspired games episode, Duck-Man admonishes Pygargue-Man for having gunned down a bad guy, since heroes shouldn't kill... just before doing a Neck Snap to another mook.
  • In "Games and Metal", Fred mocks the plot of Wayne's World for being unrealistic right after telling it includes the main character doing product placement. It immediately is followed by Fred and Seb doing product placements in a much more blatant way than their usual videos.
  • In the review of Sonic 2006 during the Anniversary video, Fred comments time travel results in bad plots. The mid-review sketch of said video includes time travel.
  • In the mid-review sketch of the RoboCop episode, a tiktoker snaps at Rob for shooting him, as it was insanely "dangerous", even though the tiktoker was drinking bleach at the exact time the incident happened.

Tropes I to Q

• I Am X, Son of Y: In his RPG games review, he is addressed by the Greybeards as "Joueur du Grenier, child of Juron" ("Juron" meaning "Swear word" in French). In the French version of Skyrim, "Dragonborn" is translated as "Enfant de dragon" (literally: "child of dragon"). Here, JdG is called "Enfant de juron" ("child of swear word"). Cue wearing a horned helmet and shouting (French) insults like Thu'ums.
• I Ate WHAT?!:
  • In the "Worst Holiday Specials" episode, Alpha V brought the JdG to the planet Gelganox to celebrate Christmas, and one of their traditions is to sacrifice young animals, which the JdG lampshades as being too extreme. Later on, Alpha V offers the JdG a drink, he drinks it and finds it delicious, when he asks Alpha V what it is, he says it's the blood of the victim, causing the JdG to look horrified at his glass of drink. He then repeats that he loves it with palpable unease.
  • In the "Bible Games" episode, JDG meets his town’s baker in hell, who casually explains the reason he ended up down here.
    Mr. Lopez: Do you remember my meringues?
    JDG: Yes?
    Mr. Lopez: They were delicious, weren’t they?
    JDG: Yes?
    Mr. Lopez: Usually, they’re made with egg whites, right?
    JDG: Yes?
    Mr. Lopez: Well, mine were made with jizz.
    JDG: Yes? …We’ll continue this conversation later.
• Identical Grandson:
  • JdG looks exactly like his grandfather Archibald von GreNier.
  • And his father too, as seen in the Terminator review.
• Ignore the Fanservice: In one particularly difficult segment in the Captain Planet game (seeinvoked That One Level), he says there's a bigger chance of a bus full of naked Norwegian ladies stopping in front of your house than getting through. After finally giving up and going to run naked on the highway, he angrily shoves the nudist Norwegian ladies who pulled up in a bus in front of his house out of his way (offscreen).
• I'm a Humanitarian: Papy Grenier's diet in Fallout 3 consisted in radioactive water and human corpses (that he had usually killed himself).
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Fred says in a commentary video on Tintin in Tibet that he never made the stereotypical "the developers were on drugs" jokes in his older reviews. However, he says this minutes before his older self is shown saying that the developers "must have been on crack".
• Incredibly Obvious Bug: Played for laughs in Papy Grenier: GTA San Andreas. Big Smoke has an entire microphone taped to his chest. Thus he can truthfully claim that there's no hidden bug, because it's not actually hidden.
• Infodump: Invoked in the Resident Evil movies special, where Fred states Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City contains a huge number of them.
• In Memoriam: invoked and Played for Laughs in the 3^nd RPG video has a short screen in memory of... JdG's CDI 450 console, who died the moment he put the Zelda's Adventure CD in it. Along with a poetic note: "The flower has wilted, but its perfume remains."
• In My Language, That Sounds Like...:
  • Says he won't make jokes about Profion's name since, in French it reads "Pro-Anus".
  • One of his ads for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang features a Laugh Track when he proudly announces he got a character called Gatotkaca, which sounds way too much like French for "poopcake".
• In Name Only: Invoked.
  • When introducing the first level of the NES segment of the Cool World video, Fred points out it has little similarity with the movie's plot.
    Fred: Do you remember this scene in the movie, when Brad Pitt arrives in a tornado and starts shooting toons in the street? If you do, you probably have a brain tumor. The NES game has zero fucks to give about the movie, absolutely zero fucks.
  • The "David and Goliath" part of Bible Adventures is introduced by pointing out it doesn't even contain the famous fight the story is famous for.
    Fred: The famous myth of the underdog who triumphed over the strong one thanks to a pebble thrown with a sling.
    [beat]
    Fred: Well, not at all. Here, we have a David and Goliath game, except there's no Goliath, and David has no sling, and instead of fighting we pick sheep up. Yeah.
• Insufferable Genius: In the Code Bleu videos, the surgeon character is this to the extreme, since, in the intern's own words:
  Intern: [Surgeons] treat only the direst and most specific of cases, and they'll make sure you know it.
• Insult to Rocks: While reviewing Batman & Robin, he says that "Saying this movie is shit would be an insult to shit!"
• Interface Spoiler: At the end of the GIGN Anti-Terror Force episode, JdG is silently facing Doug Walker who plays a villain. The credits follow, which lists the song "Gettin' Jiggy with It" which hasn't been heard in the episode before. When The Stinger appears, it's quite obvious what you'll hear, and thus, what will happen. They dance to the song.
• The Internet Is for Porn:
  • Invoked when JdG mentions that the premise of Captain N: The Game Master wouldn't work today: a skit shows "Kevin" getting sucked into the Internet through his computer screen and then yelling: "Oh my God, there's porn everywhere!"
  • In the Papy Grenier about Metal Gear Solid, Papy Grenier reaches the point in his story where he fights Psycho Mantis, who's known for reading the player's memory card. One of Papy Grenier's grandchildren says it's a good thing that the game isn't on PC. Cue a skit of Psycho Mantis reading the player's internet history and being disgusted.
• In the Style of: The Youtube thumbnail of the Minikeums special shows Fred portrayed as a Minikeums-like puppet.
• Irony:
  • One of the Fort Boyard games was very difficult to properly install, because Mindscape (the publisher, which eventually went bankrupt) forgot to add the CD-key in the box, requiring calls to the now-defunct tech support to get one. For a licensed adaptation of a game show in which keys are a MacGuffin.
  • The documentary on Pif briefly mentions that the comics, created by exiled Spanish communist José Cabrero Arnal, were censored in the USSR for being too communist, promoting anti-establishment values that the Soviet regime didn't really want any of now that they were in power.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!:
  • Invoked in the rules of the official Joueur du Grenier discussion board. In the section in which contributors can suggest reviews of specific games, it is written that merely being hard isn't enough to qualify for a JdG review.
  • There is at least one review (The Smurfs) in which he states that the game is hard but good. He considered it reviewable because its difficulty was caused by huge numbers of Trial-and-Error Gameplay sequences.
• It's Personal: In the RPG #3 video, JdG explains that he went through a bit of trouble before testing Zelda's Adventure. His CD-i died out when he first put the game in, forcing him to go on a 6-hour round trip to buy another console at an expensive price, all the while he was having a high fever, just to play one of the worst games ever created. Because of this, he furiously declares that the review will not be objective.
• Jeopardy! Thinking Music: This music is used during "waiting" periods, even though it's not really its typical meaning. Obviously, JdG is not familiar with the show (its French equivalent was only aired in France for a short time) and more with the parodies used on the Internet.
• Jerkass:
  • Invoked in the sport cartoons special, where he mentions how the main character of Attacker You! is a lot nastier than people remember. Case in point: she scolds her six-year old adopted brother for having a Potty Failure in front of a large crowd of people instead of comforting him, and later on, she harshly and loudly reminds him they're not really siblings. And if that wasn't enough, he at one point starts whining that he doesn't want to go to school, since everyone laughs at him for not knowing how to swim. Her response is to dangle him one-armed from the window of their high-rise apartment until he agrees to go to the pool.
  • Earlier, he is appalled how there's only one person in Captain Tsubasa (Jerkass Hot-Blooded Combat Pragmatist Hyuuga Kojiro) who gives a shit about the player (Glass Cannon Misugi Jun) who had a friggin' heart attack during the match. To the point that Hyuuga Kojiro is then blamed by the coach because he was the only one to stop playing after said incident.
• Jerkass Has a Point: In the first Dragon Ball film reviewed, Master Roshi now wants to see Bulma naked. Oolong (who was introduced as wanting to marry a clearly underaged girl) jumps in to condemn this disgusting behavior.
  JdG: The pedophile is right!
• Joke and Receive:
  • Twice in the Excalibur 2555 review, first when he comments on how cliché the enemies are:
    JdG: Seriously, the only way to make this game more cliché is to put in a mad scientist and Frankenstein's monster.
    [those two enemies appear with the "1-Up Sonic" jingle]
  • And after finding a bar in a cave:
    JdG: Stupid game, a bar in a cave... Why not a strip-club for transvestites while you're at it?
    Seb: Actually, that appears later in the game.
    [footage of said level is shown]
    JdG: I hate my life.
• Jump Scare:
  • Not present in the actual video, but invoked In-Universe in the Papy Grenier episode about Resident Evill.
    Kid: So, grandpa, how did it all end?
    Papy Grenier: Well, for starters, I now hate dogs— [zombified dog jumps out of the window in the game] AAH! Woah, holy shit!
  • In the sport cartoons special, he believes all the mouthless, purple background characters are ghosts, and yells when a door opens, several of them looking at the camera.
• Kabuki Sounds: The intro for the Takeshi's Challenge video uses them.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Papy Grenier, given all the horrible things he's done. At the end of the RCT special, the park is in flames, people are screaming everywhere, Fred's getaway helicopter has been shot down by NATO forces into Seb... and Fred comes down on a literal golden parachute asking his wife what's for dinner.
  • Henri Silverberg, who dies just before he was to go to trial for his crimes, leaving a flourishing empire and a very capable successor to take the reins.
• Kazoos Mean Silliness: In the second RPG special, the segment on the Lord Of The Rings game has Frodo recruit Pippin, playing the triumphant theme from the films, which almost instantly degenerates into a butchered kazoo version as Pippin's Artificial Stupidity takes over and he heads in the opposite direction from Frodo.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: During the Famicom review:
  JdG: Transformer: Convoy no Nazo, which came out in 1986 for Famicom. [begins showing game footage] The game is a 2D sidescroll— [gets shot]
  JdG: ... 'kay. The game is— [gets shot]
• Killed Off for Real: The CEO of Mauvais Jeux Inc (later retconned to be the CEO of Infogrames) is shot dead in the 11th Anniversary Episode. Fred confirmed later during a livestream that the character was retired for good, and they would come up with a more up-to-date boss character the next time they need one.
• Kubrick Stare:
  • Doug Walker at the end of the Platoon / Metal Gear video.
  • Fred does one in the Planeteers special while pondering why a guy might slip drugs in his attractive cousin's food.
    Fred: ... you sicken me.
• Lame Pun Reaction: In Code Bleu, complete with a Preemptive "Shut Up".
  Intern: Hey, the neurosurgeons, won't they have a big he— ^note In french "having a big head" is an expression to mean "having a massive ego".
  Doctor: Kiddo, if you finish that joke, I'm gonna contact your supervisor and tell them you've spent all your internship in the pediatric wing diddling kids.
• Large Ham:
  • Fred as the title character can lend into this to express his anger.
  • Seb also gets his moments while playing certain characters such as his old wizard character which essentially serves as an Expy for both Gandalf and Dumbledore, or as a replica of the Joker in the Superman 64 and Batman Forever review, but his performance as El Presidente in the Tropico narrative let's plays deserves a special mention.
  • But Bob Lennon easily takes the cake; whenever he appears on screen, he will act supremely flamboyant and over-the-top, so much that he almost steals the show.
• Laugh Track: In the Jurassic Park video, Fred reacts to the recurring Artificial Stupidity of raptor enemies in the franchise's video game adaptations with a slightly edited extract from the first film.
  Alan Grant: You bred raptors?
  Henry Wu: [nods]
  [cue canned laughter]
• Leeroy Jenkins: In the RPG 3 video, the Ranger suggests they'd take the villain by surprise, only for the Barbarian (Bob Lennon) to yell "CHARGE!"
• Legacy Character: The missionaries in the Civ 5 LP are all named Wololo.
• Line-of-Sight Name:
  • In the Excalibur 2555 A.D video, JdG thinks the plot has been written like this.
  • According to him, the fatalities in Tatoo Assassin were nothing but this. All 2196 of them.
• Literal Metaphor: A French one: during the Airwolf review, Grenier claims that the developers must really "en tenir une couche" (i.e. be really stupid), an expression which can be understood as meaning "holding a diaper"^note The accurate translation for this expression is "possessing a layer", probably related to the English expression "being thick".. Cut to a scene where Seb is playing the game developer, typing on a computer... holding a baby diaper.
  Seb: Seriously, you ever tried to create a game while holding a diaper?
  [cue losing horns and a "Joke failure" message in the bottom of the screen]
• Long List: The Valentine's Day episode ends with a (sung) Long List of porn games. Which would probably have been even longer if JdG hadn't been arrested by a cop in the middle of a sentence.
• Loony Fan: Apparently, one gave JdG the Prince of Persia 2 cartridge during a convention... at gunpoint.
• Lost in Translation: James Rolfe's cameo in the 11 Years episode had to be shortened because the clip he had sent them contained a pun that was completely untranslatable. Fred eventually showed the full clip during a Twitch live.
  James: Oh, I wish I knew French... well, I know "oui"^note pronounced like "wee". We say "piss" in English. "Would you like to play some good games? Piss, I would!"
• Luck-Based Mission: Anti-Terror Force's second level is virtually impossible to finish because the terrorists seemingly execute their hostages at random.
• Made of Iron: "[...] Autobahn Police Simulator, where you control a highway cop FROM THE FUTURE" (Terminator theme plays as the cop steps in front of a moving car, dragging it to a stop after a few feet).
  "Stop ze khar!"
• Magical Defibrillator: At the beginning of the RollerCoaster Tycoon episode, Papy Grenier needs a good shock with this to get functional and start telling his story.
• Magic Countdown: In Airwolf, even the countdown doesn't work right. "13, 12, 11, zeroooo!"
  "Happy New Year!"
• Malaproper: He will often use the word gameplay when what he means is controls (or rather, maniabilité). It can be explained by the fact that, in French, the sense of that word is less strict than in English language, from which it was borrowed.
• Male Gaze: When Papy Grenier comments on Mass Effect's Miranda, "a genetically... perfect being", all we see is a shot of her ass.
• Man of a Thousand Faces (and Voices): Seb, JdG's Sidekick and cameraman, frequently disguises himself to play a second actor on screen. So far, he played: Zordon, the CEO of Mauvais Jeux Inc. (Bad Games Inc., the Mafia-esque company behind every crappy game in the JdG universe), the four Greybeards, the clown who programmed Dragon's Lair, The Grim Reaper, Merlin, Zeus and many other roles.
• May the Farce Be with You: The whole episode about Star Wars games has naturally all its Mid-Review Sketch Shows dedicated to parodying the movies, starting with the obligatory Opening Scroll, the iconic first scene of A New Hope, the attack on the Death Star, etc.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Using bit characters named "Jean-Michel [Meaningful Name]" is a running-gag of the show.
  • Jean-Michel Bruitages ("Jean-Michel Sound Effects"), a recurring character who appears to justify why a video-game sound effect/recorded dialog/music either has a crappy quality or just sounds out of place. Excuses include "I spilled soda on my keyboard", "I had to sell my instruments to make rent", "I was wiping my keyboard clean", etc.
  • David Goodenough the lazy game developer, from the X-Perts, Pac Man 2: The New Adventures, Daemon Summoner, and Men In black videos.^note Actually the name of a real person who did work on above-mentioned X-Perts
  • Frangipanus' name come from "frangipane", an almond-flavored paste that serves as stuffing in some pastries such as himself.
• Meanwhile, in the Future…:
  • While reviewing the third Teenage Mutant Turtles movie, JdG comments "At the same time, in the past..." then realizes what he just said is absurd.
  • Also used in the Terminator review, with the intro happening "Today... in the future."
• Merchandise-Driven:
  • Does a review of these kinds of shows, "confessing" that the entire show had been created solely to sell JdG talking dolls, which never took off for some reason (the doll's lines include "Watch both ways before crossing the highway!" and "So an Arab, a Jew and a communist walk into a bar...").
  • In the Pokémon: The Movie review, when Mewtwo is wondering about his purpose:
    JdG: To sell toys, that's all!
• Metronomic Man Mashing: In the Papy Grenier Hogwarts Legacy video, Fred levitates an enemy whom he slams into the ground, keeping in sync with a Suspiciously Similar Song of Cylindric the German's theme.
• Mid-Review Sketch Show: No surprise for a show inspired by The Angry Video Game Nerd. Early on, it was usually an End-Review Sketch Show when JdG try to get rid of the game of the day. Very often with a Beginning-Review Sketch Show too as introduction. The Papy Grenier episodes are Full-Review Sketch Shows.
• Minimalist Cast: In earliest episodes, every time you saw someone on screen who wasn't JdG or young JdG (a kid wearing his shirt), it was Seb in a costume. Later, the duo's move to Brittany to get closer to other members of the NESBlog collective (that notably included the 3615-Usul team, who used to regularly guest star) as well as their growing popularity allowed them to both get more extras responding to their casting calls and book high-profile guests, meaning they could afford a decent cast. Not that this stops them from using costumes anyway.
• Misaimed Marketing: invoked
  • JdG comments on this about how Cool World, a movie that's quite adult, has so many Licensed Games, which you'd expect would be mostly played by children.
  • "The Worst Toys" includes a few examples of marketing disasters. The most blatant was probably the release of a Médecins Sans Frontières action figure line, intended to make children more aware of humanitarian crises in Africa... but also happened to be roughly the same size as G.I. Joe toys, meaning that kids could now include African civilian victims in their war scenes. Fun for everybody!
  • The episode about RoboCop games opens with Fred commenting the 1980s trend to produce toys and videogames based on ultraviolent movies (mentioning The Terminator and RoboCop as examples of the phenomenon), pointing out the oddity of setting children as the intended target of merchandising based of movies they're not supposed to have watched.
• Misidentified Weapons: In the JdG la Revanche for Jurassic Park: Trespasser, Fred erroneously names "Uzi" a MP5, and "MG42" a M1919 Browning.
• Misplaced Accent:
  • According to a dialog, in the FPS-themed video, Doug Walker's character is supposed to speak with a Russian accent. Which actually sounds more German than Russian.
  • The extraterrestrial coatholder has a Québécois accent for... no reason.
• Mistaken for Racist: Defied in the Castlevania video. When Trevor Belmont uses a crucifix to kill a vampire, the latter claims it won't work because he is Jewish. Because the vampire in question was livestreaming the event on his phone, Belmont picks up his phone to clarify that he killed him only because he was a vampire, not because he was Jewish.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: His Power Rangers Zord contains a platypus, a koala, and others.
• The Mockbuster: The Phoenix Games video's first part is about the publisher's low quality games, which are pretending to be Disney adaptations.
• Money to Burn: The Infogrames CEO lights a cigar with a bank note during the Villain Song of the Disney video.
• Mood Dissonance: In a special episode, he reviews Aladdin on Sega Genesis to demonstrate why he doesn't review good games. During the entire video, he keeps an angry face and tone... while continuously praising the game.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • Jumping straight from the death of Aeris to the Minigame Zone in the FFVII video.
  • Finding Pippin in the LOTR game, "who is evidently recreating the final scene from The Blairwitch Project". And going right back into the usual commentary.
• Mook Chivalry: Referenced in the Excalibur 2555 A.D. video and in the sequence making fun of Assassin's Creed in the humorous FAQ video.
• Moon Logic Puzzle: In every part of Excalibur 2555 A.D For example, how do you create the key to open a door? By combining a feather with sulfur.
• The Most Dangerous Video Game: A few of the reviewed video games are shown having supernatural malevolent influence on the JdG.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • In-Universe, the PlayStation jingle when you turn on the console. Though JdG notes that it's also a moment of anguish, where you wonder if the PS logo will appear or not.
  • During the second Jurassic World: Evolution video, he delays the end of the video so the T. rex can be released into its pen and deliver its Signature Roar (and refers to it as ear porn). And when it randomly roars a few seconds later, he looks ecstatic.
• Multiple Endings:
  • The video "Jeux de baston 2^ème édition" has several endings.
  • The Mass Effect episode of Papy Grenier has three different endings: DESTRUCTION, CONTRÔLE and SYNTHÈSE.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • What he points about the anime Mister Ajikko in the fourth TV special. Who knew cooking could be that awesome?
  • In the Simulation games video, he points that the games belonging to the series of the German simulators all have this kind of over-the-top blockbuster-like trailers. He then shows a parody he made of the trailer for Bus & Cable Car Simulator... on which he doesn't change the pictures, the camera angles or the epic music, he only added some snarky narrator comments.
  • In the sport cartoons special, where he claims the Japanese are fascinated by things like two soccer players passing the ball to each other.
• Mundane Solution: One Revenue-Enhancing Device serves only to provide a flat surface for the controller. Fred provides one of his own invention: a table.
• Mundane Utility:
  Jdg: Batman & Robin is a game you could use to slice ham!
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Supreme Guide Mayor's solution to journalists asking awkward questions is to shoot them.
• Musical Episode: The Disney games review features several parodies of Disney songs.
• Music to Invade Poland to: In-Universe example. In the end of The Smurfs review, JdG destroys the Smurfs village with an air bomb, while playing the Ode to Joy in background.
• My Little Panzer:
  • "The Worst Toys" includes a section about LJN's infamous Entertech water guns, which prided themselves on being as realistic as toy guns could be... and thus were often mistaken for real guns, causing shootouts with panicked cops and being used in robberies.
  • During "Strange Christmas Tapes", Fred complains that most of the toys advertised by the tapes aren't even available anymore in the present day... if not probably made outright illegal, as the footage shows off a toy toolbox with a fully functional power drill.
• Mythology Gag: In his Captain Tsubasa narrative Let's Play. During the match against France, the commentator is surprised by how much the referee is seen (giving several cards to the New Team) noting that "normally you don't see them, even when someone has a heart attack on the field" which is something that actually happened in the manga and anime (this very scene was even commented by Fred in one of the Special episodes).
• Narrating the Obvious: Grenier's big complaint about the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon.
  JdG: Stop talking to yourself.
  [extract of Peter Parker talking to himself]
  JdG: [strained] Stop talking to yourself...
  [extract of Spider-Man talking to himself]
  JdG: SHUT UP!
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: France in the Civ 6 playthrough (though with a religious ideology rather than a racial one). Complete with white circle on red background flag (with two parallel lines instead of a swastika) and a salute (both arms held parallel to each other).
• Necktie Headband: In the Takeshi's Challenge review, Grenier as a drunk salaryman coming back home is wearing this. Really fitting for a game which let you gain hearts by drinking tequila and beating up your wife.
• Necro Non Sequitur: Parodied in Bible games, where after receiving an ominous fortune cookie (Respectively "You will die today" for Fred and "The guy to your right will die today" for Seb), Fred tosses the deli chinese food to the trash, but the remaining juice shorts out a power outlet, causing a fire on a nearby curtain that then chews through a rope, releasing an enormous ceiling blade... that misses them both. Then Fred gets a cramp and dies.
• Nerd Glasses: The nerd complaining about Cretaceous dinosaurs in the so-called "Jurassic" Park wears extra-thick ones.
• Nerds Are Virgins: Used as a reason for the superiority of video-game RPGs to the tabletop version: the NPC asks a question to the female party member (Fred in a Girlish Pigtails wig), who answers, "I don't know, I'm on my period, teehee!" Awkward silence ensues.
• Nerf Arm: Heavily parodied in the RoboCop episode, for the recreation of the factory fight. The villains' weapons are all brightly colored gun toys thanks to a "shipment mistake". They still use them against RoboCop, and they have the effect you'd expect of Nerf weapons on the Immune To Bullet cyborg. Except that, when directed on the villains themselves, they are just as lethal as true firearms, as one finds out by shooting himself in the face, just as he's commenting they'll never hurt anything with these.
• Never Heard That One Before: In the Papy Grenier episode for Hogwarts Legacy, the magic wand seller sarcastically says he never heard this one when asked for a wooden wand "about a foot long, very hard."
• Never Mess with Granny: Camille Silverberg, despite being past 70 in the Renaissance, is challenged to and accepts a duel, immediately pumping iron for a week to get ready for the swordfight. When she learns the duel is with pistols, she goes ahead anyway and tanks two shots before having the man murdered in the street just after. She later obtains an extra twenty years of life, not by making a Deal with the Devil, but the devil making a deal with her. Despite him manifesting as a pair of great eyes, lidless and wreathed in flames, this works, and the devil remains terrified of her.
  Camille Silverberg: You give me an extra twenty years, and I let you walk out of here with your balls still attached to your groin!
• Never Trust a Title:
  • Commented in the first anime special, where he notes that the French titles of Captain Tsubasa ("Olive & Tom") and Attacker You! ("Jeanne et Serge") contain the names of minor characters that barely ever appear in the shows.
  • The Club JdG about The Old Testament Mondo series. The video is named The Bible (according to Mondo), but it only covers the first and second episodes (Adam and Eve story) instead of being an overview of the full series.
  • Downplayed in the Roger Rabbit episode. The Roger Rabbit NES game is the fourth and last game reviewed in the video (the other being Mighty Max on SNES, and two The Flintstones games — on Master System and on PC). However, it's by far the one with the longest review.
• Nightmare Fuel: In-Universe example in the Valentine's Day Special, with the game 177 featuring a young woman in a short skirt and scared expression, chased by a man with no music but the sound of running. When Seb points out that 177 is the article of Japanese law that deals with rape, Fred can't yank the plug out fast enough.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: In the second Ads video, Fred tries to make up the perfect toy for boys based on '90s advertising. End result: Turbo-Cradosaure, a talking dinosaur truck that pukes slime.
• Ninja Prop:
  • A casting variation in "El Presidente", the Bazar du Grenier Let's Play for Tropico 5. Since all the web videos work on a limited cast, it's quite usual for Fred to play several roles. So it's a genuine surprise when the older CIA instructor who narrate the whole story as a Framing Device and the CIA spy who got captured by Garavo's regime in the '50s happen to be actually the same person.
  • The Rambo parody is touted as having camouflage skills good enough to make him practically invisible. It later turns out he hides behind a green screen.
• Nintendo Hard: Most, if not all the games he tests. This gave rise to the "JdG: La Revanche" series, where he actually finishes games he Rage Quit during a review no matter the cost to his sanity or his relationship with his neighbors.
• No Ending: His special episode about video games' adaptations on TV. A "Low Battery" icon flashes a few times (as a reference to an earlier joke), then the video is cut short.
• No Export for You: invoked Saint Seiya for the NES was never sold in the USA. Understandable as the anime was much more popular in France than in the US.
• "No. Just… No" Reaction:
  • When the Mondo version of Pocahontas is showing a Sun Dance (men are hooked to a pole by their teats and pull on them) being performed.
    JdG: ... Not the nipples. Not the nipples.
  • When trying to figure out how old the Olsen twins would have been in 1998 (the year Duke Nukem Forever was supposed to come out in) due to their expies having a threesome with Duke, the screen freezes on his horrified expression and says "We'll Be Right Back" without actually answering the question. Twelve, by the way.
• Non-Standard Game Over: He has encountered these a few times while playing through some games.
  • In Alf for the Master System, he bought the "Alf Book" from a shop, only to find out that after retelling the basic story of the series, it sends you back to the title screen for no apparent reason.
  • In Rulers of Nations, he mentions that some of his playthroughs ended on really stupid and abrupt game overs. For one example, he lost when Nicolas Sarkozy got murdered by siccing a rampaging bull on him.
  • This trope causes him much frustration in Alex Kidd in High-Tech World, where ways to get a sudden game over abound. The examples he ran into include putting on a suit of armor (it's too heavy for Alex to move while wearing it), talking to the guards in the third level too many times, or presenting them with false travel passes (which were obtained after seemingly normal quests), but what really caused him to snap is when he ran out of time.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Unsurprisingly, Papy Grenier's theme park is full of these, with a ride like "The Neckbreaker" where you go from 300 to 0 kph in 2 seconds, and saving money by firing the ride maintenance technicians. In his desire to make a profit, he put all the animals in the same cage then let them free to run in the park.
  • And in his take on Jurassic Park, it takes him a while to fence in the dinosaurs.
  • "The 5th Element" features his take on magma-filled factories full of unconnected platforms:
    Seb: [in such a factory, yelling to be heard over the machinery] THIS IS WHERE WE MAKE BISCUITS!
• No Sense of Direction: According to JdG, Batman himself in the Batman Forever adaptation game (to comment that the game's level design is a counter-intuitive maze), leading to yet another parody sketch.
• Nostalgia Filter:
  • Completely averted since Grenier's specialty is to test old and bad video games. He is quick to remind the audience that the earlier video games didn't have many Anti-Frustration Feature that nowadays would be taken for granted, such as characters automatically facing the opponent in fighting games, that they usually cost an arm or that with the lack of Internet it was very easy to be fooled into buying a bad game.
  • Also averted when it comes ot the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) cartoon. While he has made it clear he is a huge fan of the franchise, Fred makes it clear in the special dedicated to the series that it was quite bad, and that most people complaining about newer series not being as good are mostly speaking from a perspective heavily clouded by nostalgia.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: When JdG and other friends play the fighting game Bikini Karate Babes, they are not enthralled by the skimpily-dressed sexualized women at all, looking rather bored instead and making comparisons to auto expos. Only Seb seems to react in accordance, by throwing bills as if to a stripper, but not looking happy doing it. A zipping sound is heard, but it's just one of the guys putting on his raincoat to leave. Later, during a game about construction vehicle combat, we hear another zipper, but it's not a raincoat...
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • In the "2D to 3D" episode, the opening of Mortal Kombat: Special Forces is shown with a disclaimer "No, this ain't edited, it's the game's real intro sequence."
  • In the "girly shows" special, a shot of Hashizo and his cat grinning very creepily is accompanied by "Psycho" Strings and a "non-edited image" message.
  • Home Alone 2's loooong elevator sequences have a disclaimer stating it's the real length of the cutscene.
  • When Seb summarizes the absurd plot of Stargazer, a disclaimer saying "this is the real scenario of the game" shows up on screen, while Grenier sports a very strained, fake smile.
  • X-Perts also have a disclaimer when pirating a computer, which takes several minutes with no input at all from the player.
  • In the Ganso Saiyuuki: Super Monkey Daibouken segment of the Famicom video, he introduces a game's obscene Easter Egg by a screen which reads "Message from the developers... (really for real)".
  • Fred has to repeat several times that he's not making this up when describing the Massive Multiplayer Crossover of the Mondo World series, which is indeed an unbelievable mess.
    JdG: I am NOT joking! There's a two-headed dog, an ugly dinosaur, a bear, Geronimo the descendant of Pocahontas, Mulan, Aladdin, Hercules, a Ninja Turtle, and David fucking King of the Jews, who are strolling on a giant eagle — a BLUE eagle.
  • During the scene in the Mondo version of the Old Testament where Adam and Eve are fighting dinosaurs, discovering fire, and making spears, a message appears on the bottom of the screen reading "You are still watching an animated adaptation of the Bible."
  • When reviewing dating game Man Enough (first FMV episode), Fred plays the game's player character asking a young woman: "Excuse me, miss, you're really lovely. Are you a porn actress?" This is immediately followed by a message stating it's a real line from the game.
  • During the second parter of the 11 years anniversary, when reviewing Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Fred shows footage of him holding the controller but not pushing any buttons while the game plays itself in the background and insists that "it's not a montage. I haven't touched any button during the last 30 seconds and the game plays itself".
  • In the special Jeux en Vrac about Peter Molyneux, Fred mentions Molyneux managed the development of some of his later games as a "creative director" by going to the office unannounced and asking his developers to add features or plot points that came right out of the blue. Cue Fred reenacting one of such events (about Fable II), while the message "This is a real anecdote" is written in the bottom of the screen.
    Fred as Peter Molyneux: My dog is dead! I want a dog in the game, and I want it to die too!
  • Fred explaining the player character's stats in the Jeux en Vrac about the ER adaptation:
    Fred: Finally, to replenish Calmness, you can work out, you can have a shower, or you can bang the nurses.
    [Beat]
    Fred: I'm not kidding.
  • The Idol Manager' video has a variation where Fred holds up a sign reading "I'M TALKING ABOUT A VIDEO GAME" when discussing which stats are better for your female characters, how to get better results from them, or other sentences that would get him lynched in the streets if taken out of context.
    Fred: When you recruit younger girls, they tend to be Cute. But around 14-15, they get less Cute and become Sexier and Sexier.
    [beat]
    Fred: You're sure the sign's visible, right?
    
    Fred: You can also get to know your girls more intimately.
    [Fred blocks a swipe from the boom mic with the sign]
    Fred: Only the older ones. The theme of this video is "Disturbing but legal".
• Not So Stoic: During the Frostpunk Narrative Let's Play, Seb's character seems like a semi-competent and confident, if a bit overwhelmed at time, leader for the group of survivors. Then, once he's in his tent alone...
  Leader: Captain's log, First entry . [hold his head in his hand] AAAAAAAAH! We're fucked! We're going to diiie! I don't know what to do! AAAARGH!
• Not What It Looks Like: The Japanese commercial for Ocarina of Time has a young girl making some... questionable sounds. Fred wonders if perhaps he's been watching too much Hentai.
• Obligatory Earpiece Touch: Fred does it in the Resident Evil movies special, only for Seb to point out Fred isn't actually wearing an earpiece. Cut to Fred's finger which now has a mouth and eyes on it, urging him to kill Seb.
• Obligatory Joke:
  • About Beyblade: "How can you make 500 episodes about spinning tops? It must end up going round in circles... AH!"
  • The Toilet Tycoon review sees Fred and Seb having to eenie-meenie-miny-mo who's going to have to do the overwhelmingly obvious joke of calling the game shitty.
• Obstructive Foreground:
  • Commented while reviewing the Mega Drive version of Fantasia:
    JdG: Note we are in one of those many games where the devs thought "Yay, cool, I'll put stuff on the foreground, it looks so pretty!" Okay, listen to me, devs: no, putting things in the foreground that block your view isn't cool, it's stupid. When showing the movie Fantasia, you won't splash an audience member's face in the middle of the screen.
  • By the Batman Forever review, it has clearly become one of Grenier's Berserk Buttons, reducing him once again to Angrish (well, in French).
  • Nightmare Circus has another stand-out example in Combat Mode, where the obstructive foreground is made worse by the fact that some of the selectable characters are stationary.
• Obviously Evil: In the Papy Grenier episode about Resident Evil, Papy Grenier says that he had a feeling there was a traitor in their group, "But who?" Cut to Albert Wesker laughing ominously while slicking back his hair.
• Offhand Backhand: In the Instruments of Chaos review, Seb gets one from a foaming-at-the-mouth JdG when asking to help.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Often done, for obvious reasons, with lampshades aplenty; probably most hilariouly in the Robin Hood video where Fred starts describing a scene of total war between lion-riding knights and centaurs in a burning forest to his daughter who's complaining there aren't any visuals anymore. He's a lot less appreciative when the actual games do that, though.
  JdG: Yeah, doing stuff offscreen is great, we do it all the time, but that's because we're poor.
• Off-the-Shelf FX: Parodied in the Miami Vice / Knight Rider special, where a chase scene appears to take place on a very fake-looking boat... before cutting to the perp driving a remote-control toy boat.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: In the third RPGs video, the not-Hobbit loudly complains that he got his shoes stolen, again. (The making-of points out it's ainvoked Throw It In!)
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Played for laughs in the beginning of the Total Recall / Predator review, when picking up a cart triggers some. It also doubles as a sort of Shout-Out to Death Note, since said Latin chanting comes from this anime.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • Invoked in the first Ces jeux qui m'ont marqué, when Fred explains playing Wing Commander III at the time of its release blew his mind due to the novelty of a game with so many FMV cutscenes in it, while pointing out it became the norm in the +25 years years which passed since this era.
  • Also invoked in the Castlevania review, where he mentions that the first game's use of Antepieces, gradually ramping of the difficulty as the levels go on rather than throw everything at the player from the start (as was commonplace at the time) seem like obvious game design tips in the present days but were a huge deal at the time.
• Once per Episode: Early on, Seb saying something incredibly stupid (or making a really bad pun), making JdG either embarrassed or enraged (to the point of killing him sometimes).
• One Bullet at a Time: Commented on in the Airwolf games video.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: The JdG is very audibly from the South of France (from near Perpignan to be precise, though he currently lives in Brittany), especially when he starts yelling.
• Opening Scroll: A text scroll opens the Star Wars games review, naturally. With plot points actually calling back to the "Alpha V Gelga Nek" storyline from a previous episode.
• "Open!" Says Me: Played for laughs in the 11th anniversary special, where Magret is shown dramatically kicking open a bead curtain.
• Operator from India: Joked about when talking about The Last Airbender, complaining that the Fire Nation army (which was rather infamously Race Lifted from Japan-inspired to entirely played by Indian actors for no good reason) looks more like the annual meeting of SFR's hotline operators.
• ...Or So I Heard: He compares having to match the right keycard to the right door in Metal Gear to pop-up ads intruding on porn. Which he, uh, read about, on Wikipedia. While looking for porn.
• Our Zombies Are Different: In the Resident Evil movies video, Fred introduces the third type of classical zombies: there are the slow walkers as in The Walking Dead, the fast infectees as in 28 Days Later... and the third is the zombies in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, the Rule of Scary Zombies, which have a knack for spectacle and attack specifically to cause a Jump Scare. Fred even interviews a director who's such a zombie and who specifically asks his actors to make rolls and cartwheels to attack from improbable angles.
• Overly Long Scream: After Grenier points out that on X-Perts, the level 2 is absolutely identical to level 1... except that the pirating bars are even longer, he lets out a frustrated scream spread over several scene changes of him in various silly positions.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Fred comments that Duke Nukem Forever is a flawed and generic FPS (but not a bad game) which would have been forgotten without his vaporware status, the fact it was so overhyped during its development, and it being part of a famous franchise.invoked
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • In "Games adapted from French movies", a black dude replaces Seb by just wearing a wig. Fred remains oblivious for the rest of the video.
  • The elf leader (Big Bad of the "RPG" trilogy) is very obviously in-character a human pretending to be an elf, wearing a Santa Elf costume instead of a fantasy-themed one and only speaking basic sentences (the kind you'll find in a tourist's guidebook) in elvish. Also his pointy ears keep falling off.
  • Subverted in Mission: Impossible. Fred with the cartoony plastic schnoz and fake mustache really is the ambassador. Ethan is the woman in the party dress.
• Parodies of Fire: Used while mocking a player character's stiff running animation in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue.
• Parody Assistance:
  • In the Phoenix Games episode, Michelangelo is dubbed by Adrien Larmande, who dubs him in the French localization of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.
  • In the Mass Effect Papy Grenier episode, most of the Normandy's crew is dubbed by their voice actors from the French localization, with the exception of Male.Shepard (played and dubbed by Fred himself)^note Female.Shepard also appears and is dubbed by her French voice actress and Liara (for schedule reasons).
  • In the Scooby-Doo episode, Scooby-Doo is actually voiced by Éric Missoffe, the character's official French voice actor.
• Pastel-Chalked Freeze Frame: Used extensively in the Takeshi's Challenge review... among many other manga/anime visual tropes, in fact.
• Patriotic Fervor: Averted, as he's fond of ripping games made by Infogrames and Cryo Interactive. And when he does, it's always ironically:
  JdG: And it was developed by a French company! Long live camembert!
• Perma-Stubble: Since his weight loss, JdG turned his beard into this.
• Perspective Flip:
  • The Castlevania video is told from the point of view of the vampires, whose fun house party turns into a slasher movie as Trevor Belmont slaughters them one by one.
  • Voluntarily invoked in the Ocarina of Time video: instead of the usual bit about people complaining about their broken pots, here we see the pottery merchant become richer and richer and eventually marry Zelda.
• Petty Childhood Grudge: In the Demo One review, Fred makes a reference to "those 'friends' we all had growing up, who invited us to play video games but spent the time playing and only letting us watch." Then he looks directly at the camera and says "That's right, Damien, it's you I'm talking about."
• Pimp Duds: In the Merchandise-Driven shows special, to mock the extravagant clothes found in series like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Seb shows up dressed like a pimp while presenting himself as the regional Beyblade champion for Poitou-Charentes.
• Planet of Steves:
  • There's a lot of guys named Jean-Michel running around, each with his own Meaningful (last) Name.
  • The second RPG episode mentions the "Elfes Sylvains", who are all named Sylvain^note "Elfes Sylvains" is French for "Wood Elves", while "Sylvain" is a French male given name. They actually appear in the third RPG episode, and they include a female one (who is named "Sylvain" too).
• Plot Hole: Invoked.
  • Fred notes during his review of the Fort Boyard point'n click that the game is indecisive whether In-Universe Fort Boyard exists as a Show Within a Show (the protagonist is explicitly mentioned to be a former contestant, technical locals for the show's creation can be entered when the player character goes back to the Fort), or if the Fort Boyard mythology is real (Père Fourras isn't a character in costume but a kind of ghost guardian of the Fort).
  • In Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, Fred notes Lara Croft is inexplicably alive and no reason is given, despite being a sequel of another installment ending with Lara's apparent death. He also points out the actual explanation for her survival is in a Dummied Out cutscene.invoked
  • In Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, there's a scene where a policeman shots a zombie in flame. Fred immediately points out he had no reason to assume the zombie wasn't just a severely injured person, because it happens before Raccoon City police knew there were zombies in the town.
• Poe's Law:
  • In his superhero episode, JdG doesn't seem to grasp that all the absurdity in Batman: The Movie was one of the selling points of those days' Batman. Then again, it might be deliberate. What would he get angry at, otherwise?
  • Same thing in the commercials episode, with him ranting against the toilet paper ad that's in the style of a musical, while this ad is very obviously quite parodic and tongue-in-cheek in the first place.
  • In the "Games Based on the Bible" episode, Fred introduces The You Testament segment by stating he hesitated about reviewing it, because he initially thought it was "a troll game", before concluding it actually expressed sincere views from its creator. The review itself clearly shows this game is such a surreal, confusing mess that it somehow makes more sense as a parody.
• Poison Mushroom: In Back to the Future Part III, there is a item that screams Power-Up, but is this.
• Police Code for Everything: 9-7 is apparently an unauthorized ostrich race.
• Political Overcorrectness: The Tomb Raider episode, filmed at the peak of Fred's beef with YouTube's policies, takes place in a cataclysmically sanitized world, where everything lewd has been turned into a blur, profanity auto-censors itself, any kind of controversial topic becomes impossible to mention out loud, singing preexisting songs is met with violence, and there is nothing between September 10th and 12th. This prompts the search for the Mysterious Green Dollar, in the hope of reverting this mess.
• Porn Stache:
  • Vegeta's mustache is one of the reasons he hates GT (along with Trunks and the robot).
  • In the Platoon / Metal Gear episode, the "Al Moustacha" terrorist gang members all have one (including the one female).
  • Brad Stallion's gets compared to this guy. ^note A beauf is a city-dweller with all the class and social charm of a redneck, which tells you all you need to know about Brad.
  • Fred himself grows one in preparation for the Miami Vice / Knight Rider special, which he had to explain in one video leading up to the special.
• President Evil:
  • Papy Grenier as Mayor / Supreme Guide of SimCity.
  • Henri Silverberg (and later Camille Silverberg) for Lyon.
• Press Start to Game Over:
  • In the SNES version of Dragon's Lair, the password screen is a mini-game where you have to push lettered balls underwater to set the password, Grenier finds out that you can die by letting a ball fall upon you.
  • In The Addams Family video, he starts his review of Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt by pointing out that you can get hurt on the level select screen.
  • When reviewing Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (SNES), he quickly finds out that an ennemy can kill you if you don't move immediately to the right.
  • In Takeshi's Challenge, one of the password options allows you to punch the person you're typing your password to, leading to the game over screen.
• Press X to Not Die:
  • He parodies how this game mechanic has gotten too easy in recent games in the Dragon's Lair review: JdG shows himself being threatened with a gun by Seb, who is about to shoot him and yells. The on-screen text says "Press X to avoid the bullet", but Seb keeps on yelling without shooting, and is even taking out a Cubitus comic book to read, waiting for JdG to react.
  • He mentions that by comparison, Dragon's Lair hits the other end of the spectrum by not telling the player anything: Neither what button to press, nor within which (very unforgiving) window of time.
• Presumed Flop: Fred comments that, despite its negative reviews, Duke Nukem Forever didn't bomb and the sales covered the cost of Gearbox's work to salvage the game.invoked
• Previously on…: Parodied to all heck in the episode following the Platoon / Metal Gear review, which at first shows clips from it (since it is indeed a follow-up), but soon segues into unrelated skits, still with the dramatic voice-over.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: In-Universe. Every licensed game he plays is of poor quality.
• Product as Superhero: The recurring Captain NordVPN, a... questionable Superman Substitute used as the mascot of the brand's sponsored ads. One of the commercials even features him facing trial over his tendency to ignore people in danger in favor of plugging more internet security services.
• Product Placement:
  • Played for Laughs. The Star Wars episode is pretty much a 20-minute ad for the Zozan Kebab, located in Fred's town. The alien rebels have their base in it, and Fred and Seb are given kebabs instead of a medal at the end. They have to make it clear in a disclaimer that the show isn't sponsored by Zozan. However, Fred stated on Twitter that it did increase the Kebab's clientele, with the owner none the wiser.
  • Due to YouTube becoming increasingly restrictive in 2018 about monetization of copyrighted content (which ended up demonetizing many of his most watched videos such as the Harry Potter one), JdG now advertizes for free-to-play games at the beginning of his recent videos. He tries to make the best of it with his humorous style still.
• Psychotic Smirk: During the Heavy Nova review:
  JdG: I'm sure it was some kind of lunatic who hid this game in my room for me to find!
  [brief cut to Seb, holding the boom pole, smirking away]
• Pull a Rabbit out of My Hat: In the "RPG 3" video, when the Sage announces that he's going use his magic... all he does is pulling a plush rabbit out of a top hat. The villain sneers, but the plush gets tossed into his face, showing it's a Killer Rabbit.
• Pungeon Master: A large part of his humor consists of making very obvious puns, which will virtually always receive a Lampshade Hanging.
• Puns: Tons of them.
  • Seb is prone to make impromptu lame puns, which leads either to JdG making a Facepalm or trying to kill him.
  • In the Dragon's Lair review: "Alright, guys, today, we're going to like leather, I tell you. Because today's game tanned my hide. Leather, tanned, crappy joke."
  • On Batman & Robin: "This game was made by a company named Probe, so you already know it will live forever in the annals." Cue an Xbox achievement.
  • On Excalibur 2555 A.D. : "This game isn't so hard, it is just awfully long and shitty and we take too much time on non-logical enigmas... I shouldn't be surprised, the editor who made this, Tempest, is known to only make stinky games!" (In French, "Tempest" sounds like "t'empestes": "you stink".)
  • In his Simulators games review, after Seb tested a game about toilets (Toilet Tycoon, to be exact), JdG draws the short straw about making an awful one:
    JdG: Hey, your game about toilets... It smells like shit, doesn't it?
• Punny Name:
  • In Mission: Impossible, Fred plays an Ethan Hunt expy named "Méthane" (methane gas), which would have been "Ethyne" in the English subs.
  • In the Tomb Raider video, Fred mentions Lara's stiff maniability is one of the negative points of the first game, then mocks it as "Tomb Raideur" (the French word "Raideur" is pronounced exactly like "Raider" in English, and means "stiffness").
• Queer People Are Funny:
  • In "Jeux de baston 2^ème édition", when Fred is ranting about the fact that in the original Street Fighter there's no boobs but men's chests, a guy can be heard saying that it doesn't bother him. Fred asks who said that.
  • And in the porn games special, "what kind of man can enjoy playing with an enormous dick?... don't answer that."
• Quirky Work: "Were the devs on drugs?" is a recurring theme in the earlier videos.
  • He often asks this questions about video games when they get too trippy, such as Astérix and the Great Rescue.
  • Also the Téléchat special.
  • And his conclusion about Batman: The Movie. (Though here it isn't clear whether he's implying it was made on drugs, or if he's advocating taking some to recover from the viewing. Probably both.)
  • In a scene where the background is especially trippy during the Nightmare Circus review, Fred lampshades the fact he'd been doing this a lot.
    JdG: Okay, then... I know we've used the joke that "the developers have been taking drugs" way too often in the JdG... but we should have kept it for this moment!

Tropes R to Z

• Race Lift:
  • The English subs of the Harry Potter episode do this to Georges Tucéki for the sake ofinvoked Woolseyism. In the original, "Tucéki" is said to be of Greek ascend. In the English subs, he becomes "Yunohu" and is supposed to be partly Japanese, but he is still played by Bob Lennon, who is Caucasian.
  • Friar Tuck in the Robin Hood video is now Jewish. Mostly for the sake of a "call me Rabbi Hood!" pun, and he later turns out to have a "confusion spell" that consists of his opponents stopping the fight to figure out if attacking him would be considered antisemitic.
  • In the Papy Grenier about GTA San Andreas, CJ (who is black in the game) is played by Fred (who doesn't use Blackface in the video); this is lampshaded by the kids, who points that the character in the flashback doesn't look like their grandpa at all. Also, the episode features a scene where Big Smoke (who is black, too) is played by Seb.
• Racial Face Blindness:
  • JdG starts making such a joke while commenting on the Japanese Spider-Man series, but is cut short by a censoring alarm.
  • A Rambo game uses the same skins for several characters, including the Vietnamese soldiers. Naturally, Fred tries to explain without falling into this trope and fails.
• Rated M for Manly: "Nothing like the death of a Magical Girl to start this video, because this one is for you, for Men. Real men, hard men, hairy men, those who have something in their pants, who have a meat-and-two-veg, a wiener, a johnson, a loaded cannon. Welcome aboard, Men, this video is for you." Accompanied by the Terminator theme.
• Readings Blew Up the Scale: In the episode for Star Wars, JdG calling The Phantom Menace the best film in the series makes his "Sarcasm Detector" beeps loudly. Then, when he praise the quality of a PlayStation game of the same name, the detector explodes.
• Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud: The Excalibur 2555 A.D review shows the voice actor recording the dialogues for the game reading everything in the same flat tone, including the stage directions.
• Read the Freaking Manual: The trope is said to him by the voice-over at the end of his "guide to being angry at your computer" skit in the Airwolf review.
• Rebuilt Pedestal: JdG is a big fan of The Angry Video Game Nerd. So when James Rolfe's friend Mike Matei accused JdG of plagiarizing AVGN (comparing him to The Irate Gamer and calling him a "fucking bum" in the process), he was reportedly rather bummed out. Later, JdG posted a comment on one of his videos saying he talked it out with Mike, and that Mike's not a bad person after all. The reconciliation was officially confirmed when JdG made a humorous cameo in Mike Matei's video "NES Reproductions by Mike" and solidified years later with a cameo of the Nerd himself in the 11th Anniversary episode.
• Record Needle Scratch: Sometimes used when he finds something which is both unexpected and incredibly stupid.
• Recycled with a Gimmick:
  • Recycled in France. He is like The Angry Video Game Nerd with much less profanity. In fact, some of his viewers' tendency to label him an AVGN ripoff is lampshaded in the Home Alone game review, where one of the things that is written on his "to-do list" is "rip off the AVGN".
  • In Stargazer:
    JdG: By the way, this game is a futuristic one, I kind of forgot about that when walking past that guy with a Merlin's beard!
    Seb as Old merchant: Greetings, traveler, and welcome to my potion store... OF THE FUTURE!!!
• Redheaded Stepchild: JdG is guilty of this in the 2013 "Fighting Games" video, when he says that Ryu being redheaded is one of the numerous flaws of the first Street Fighter game.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Within the main duo, Fred tends to be the more angry one compared to the more relaxed Seb. This also translates in their film reviews, where Fred is more of a Caustic Critic while Seb is more of a Deadpan Snarker. Notably inverted in the duo's Jurassic World Dominion review however where after the Jurassic World trilogy presses Seb's Berserk Button one time too many (he really hates how it anthropomorphized the dinosaurs), he engages in a furious (and hilarious) rant about the constant Pandering to the Base in the Jurassic Park franchise, to Fred's hilarity.
• Red Right Hand: Fred literally grows one in the Nightmare Circus video due to the game being so evil.
• Relax-o-Vision:
  • An audio example in the Captain Planet review. After Fred dies in That One Level, he stays still for a few seconds before unleashing an absolute deluge of obscenities. We only hear the beginning of it before sound is replaced by a small musical piece... which proceeds to end too soon, allowing us to get another glimpse at it before it restarts. "Oops, it seems this musical piece wasn't long enough."
  • When JdG mentions that one of the objectives in Brad Stallion is to hump a sheep, the action is censored by a montage of flowers, as Grenier's horrified screams can be heard.
• Rent-a-Zilla:invoked The Problem with Licensed Games is represented by massive cartridges duking it out in New York.
• Repetitive Name:
  • In one of the Club JdG episodes about the "Mondo Cinematic Universe", Fred comments how stupid it is that "Mondo World" translates to "World World".
  • In the Terminator episode, Grenier's father is called "Mr. Grenier" and calls his son "Grenier". Which means the JdG's name in-universe is... Grenier Grenier.
• Resolved Noodle Incident: The ending of Phoenix Games (made years after Seb-from-the-Future initial appearance) reveals why he wears an eyepatch: Seb watched the Teletubbies' sun through a telescope.
• Retired Monster: If you take Papy Grenier's stories at face value (that he was a sociopathic Pokémon trainer and bloodthirsty dictator instead of playing the games), he is this.
• Revealing Continuity Lapse: Played for Laughs in an episode that gives advice on making your own webseries, especially avoiding this kind of error: the scene plays out as a dialogue with the camera switching to each character as they speak, and every switch features a blatantly obvious error (the background goes from a kitchen to a veranda, a cell phone becomes a banana, one guy's Cool Shades become an enormous pair of novelty sunglasses, etc.), but the one they focus on is that a drawer in the background is closed in one shot and ajar in another. And of course, Fred is bareheaded in the first shot and wearing a wig in the last one where he tells viewers to watch out for such basic mistakes.
• Revisiting the Roots: The X-Perts 2016 episode is done in the style of the videos from the beginning of the series, poking fun at their low quality and mocking several tropes used at the time.
  JdG: What's happening? Why is the picture so small? Why is it misshaped? Why is everything ugly and gross? AND WHY IS THE SOUND SATURATING WHEN I SPEAK LOUDER?!
  Seb: I think we're back in 2010... Oh fuck, my voice, shit!
• Right-Hand Cat: The CEO of Mauvais Jeux Inc. is often seen stroking a (plush) white cat, who looks like Marie from The Aristocats.
• Ring-Ring-CRUNCH!: The Beat-em Ups review opens with Grenier punching his alarm clock.
• Roger Rabbit Effect: The protagonists of the Scooby-Doo episode's Mid-Review Sketch are a parody of the Scooby Gang where the four humans are played by live-action actors, while Scooby-Doo is an animated character.
• Running Gag:
  • Seb making a stupid remark off-screen and JdG getting angry about it.
  • Anyone making an Incredibly Lame Pun and showing anger or embarrassment.
  • Lampshade Hanging.
  • Something supernatural/unbelievable seems to happen, then a completely mundane explanation is immediately given.
  • Interrupting particularly crass jokes just before the punchline, usually with a "CENSORED" or "JOKE ABORTED" banner.
  • The use of "Baba Yetu" during uplifting moments... and usually interrupted by the Moment Killer.
  • Making a confusing, weird convoluted intro and saying it didn't make sense and it doesn't matter to the episode anyway.
  • Whenever they need a Bit Character, he's always named Jean-Michel [Meaningful Name]. Taken furthest with Jean-Michel Random, a Vox Pops specialist for a... Vox Pops segment.
  • The use of the Justice song "Stress" for segments involving delinquents and other (non-)violent/scary people. It's notably used in the Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures episode, when Pac-Man starts acting like a jerk. Or in one of the FMV games, when the SWAT has to apprehend... a diabetic 64 year-old grandma — cue a shot of old people walking in the street with the threatening music in the background.
  • Also the use Joey Scarburry's "Believe It or Not" for "happy ending" type punchlines.
  • Things often explode around Fred, in reaction to the games he's playing, be they sarcasm detectors, the fourth wall or feminists.
  • Putting '80s sitcom-style ending credits after making an Incredibly Lame Pun, with the theme song of Full House or Perfect Strangers.
  • The Papy Grenier episode on Metal Gear Solid has a running gag where Fred as Solid Snake gets increasingly angry at characters (often defeated bosses) telling their tragic backstories, which distracts him from his mission.
  • Whenever JdG has to make up a name for an in-game character (occasionally skit characters too), it's often either "Pépito" or "Sabrina". The latter is even sometime used for male characters.
  • Whenever a character from the reviewed work is acting like a pervert or a molester, the video cuts to a "Sonic Sez" PSA from the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon.
• Russian Roulette: When riffing on the minigame Dating Sim, Fred wears a red headband while a guy yelling "Di di mau!" hands him a revolver, picks up the gun, then...
  Sorina: Uh... Can't we go to the beach instead?
  JdG: Honey, can't you see I'm in the middle of a minigame?
• Sanity Slippage:
  • During his Dragon's Lair review.
  • Most sessions of "JdG: La Revanche" are disastrous for his mental state, too.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: The specialty of Jean-Michel Bruitages (Jean-Michel Soundeffects), who apparently does every sound effect in crappy games himself.
  Director: Alright, now gimme the cry of a dying scorpion, okay?
  JM Bruitages: ROOOOOOOOOOOR!!
• Scare Chord: Parodied in the Nightmare Circus video, where the scare chord is provided by Fred screeching away on a violin on-camera.
• Scenery Porn: The temple with strange statues, which serves as the Outworld in the second part of the Mortal Kombat video, is a real place (the Musée Robert-Tatin) which has been barely modified for the video, beside adding a purple filter, tiki torches, tables, and game systems used for the sequence. The video even pauses twice for several seconds to display some of its works (first when Fred and Rayden go to the place, then without the filter in the acknowledgment part of the ending credits).
• Scatting: JdG sometimes does this when he hears ridiculous music in video games he reviews.
• The Scrappy: In-Universe.
  • Like any self-respecting retro gamer, JdG despises the dog from Duck Hunt.
    JdG: I hate that fucking dog! Whoever says he never wanted to shoot him is a liar!
  • He hates Hashizo (Benjamin in French) from Ai Shite Night, andinvoked is overjoyed when he sees his older brother slapping him.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In-Universe. The gravity factor in Airwolf is one of the main reasons why the game is nigh-impossible to play in an enjoyable way. The helicopter keeps going down at all time, and since it explodes almost instantly by hitting ANYTHING, JdG has to constantly give light taps on his joystick to keep the copter from crashing on the ground or going too high and crash on the ceiling.
  JdG: It's like doing archery on a fucking trampoline!
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the Papy Grenier episode about the first Resident Evil game, after Wesker gives his colleagues one stupid piece of advice too many regarding zombies:
  Wesker: Don't move a muscle. Their eyesight is based on movement.
  [beat]
  Gilles: Fuck this, I'm outta here.
  Chris: Yeah, me too.
• See-Thru Specs: The sunglasses always dangling from JdG's shirt are described as allowing to see the state of someone's soul (which ends up damaged after really awful games and big videos).
• Self-Deprecation:
  • In the Taz-Mania review:
    JdG: So, Taz is told that somewhere exists an egg bigger than my ass...
  • The 2014 FAQ video contains a sequence in which the meeting between the JdG and the NESBlog teams is played as a reenactment of the Jurassic Park scene in which Grant, Sattler, Hammond, and Malcom (respectively played by Fred, Seb, RealMyop, and Usul) are flying toward Isla Nublar, with Malcom rewritten as a far-left economist.^note Usul is very openly far-left on the political spectrum.
  • The Disney-themed episode has, at one point, a Long List of things "a thousand times worse than that" ("that" being the game The Lion King: Simba's Mighty Adventure on PlayStation). Said list includes the JdG opening credits.
  • After two "FAQ" videos in which he was either a Trolling Creatorinvoked or giving joke answers to obvious questions, he made a totally serious FAQ video, which was named "Boring FAQ".
  • The third part of the RPG episode casts fellow Youtuber Mathieu Sommet as a human mistaken for a Hobbit. Mathieu Sommet is 165 cm (5'5") tall.
  • "Games and Metal":
    • The segment about the Wayne's World game is introduced by a summary of the movie. Fred mentions the main character's show contains product placement and that he has an Asian girlfriend, then laughs about how unrealistic it is.
    • The Black Metallers antagonists behaving like a Goblin horde are played by actual Black Metallers.
  • In the GTA San Andreas's Papy Grenier episode, Fred refers the weight/fat gameplay feature by showing a footage of an overweight CJ while commenting it, "It was the time when I was funny. Run, Fatty!"
  • The conclusion of the AB Productions special:
    JdG: Of course, I'm making fun of [AB Productions' series], because it now became awfully kitsch to watch. But, even if I weren't part of the watchers at the time, I still have some fondness for those series, which were often made with limited means, botched work, low-budget production, scripts delivered at the last minute, actors who don't look very interested, and whose acting is bad, the boom pole which appears onscreen... shit, all this completely describes us!
  • The Terminator special has his younger self reading the JdG comics; he tells him to stop reading that crap.
  • El Presidente was primarily written by Usul, who is well-known in the French sphere for being very, very left-leaning. He eventually makes a cameo... as a comically over-the-top Soviet agent.
  • French video-game journalist Julien Chièze plays his own role in the Mission: Impossible video, bound and tortured because he wrote a misleadingly positive review of the game.
  • The Harry Potter video features the Youtuber Cyprien as the animated portrait which guards one of the dorms. His password is "I prefer Norman". Cyprien and Norman are two French Youtuber working in the same niche (and real life friends who occasionally appear in each other's videos).
  • In the same video, Professor Solid Snape interrogates Henry Butter (Fred), asking among other things the difference between JdG and AVGN, to which Henry-Fred replies, as to all the other questions, that he doesn't know, barely holding back tears.
  • In the Anniversary video, Fred comments the time-travel plot of Sonic 2006 by saying time-travel plots don't make sense. The Anniversary video's plot itself includes time-travel, and Seb reacts to Fred's comment by awkwardly concealing the screenplay of the video.
  • The Scooby-Doo episode features a cameo of AHL (as himself) mistaken for a mummy by Fred. AHL (Alain Huyghues-Lacour) is a video game journalist who works in the sector since the mid-eighties, and was in his late seventies at the time the video was made.
  • The Bible Games video has Fred being almost sent to Hell solely because of his Twitter post history.
• Sensory Abuse:
  • He describes Raid 2020's sound as "audio deflowering".
    JdG: And not just because it makes your ears bleed!
  • He's more ironic with China Syndrome.
    JdG: Hmmm, now that's good stuff for the ears!
  • Also makes such a remark on the title screen music of Spider-Man: Web of Fire on 32X. He also literally shouts his entire (brief) review of the game because of the eardrum-bursting music.
    JdG: And at the drums, Osama Bin Laden!
  • During the Megadrive Wayne's World segment of "Games and Metal", Fred describes the sound effect of your weapon (a guitar) as "dolphins' dying screams" and the cutscene version of the movie's "Bohemian Rhapsody" scene as "'Bohemian Rhapsody' played on a jigsaw".
• Sequelitis: In-Universe, discussed in several specials:
  • Commented in the second anime special, when talking about Yu-Gi-Oh! (after commenting Dragon Ball GT).
    JdG: Take Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds for example. It's a wonderful series: it shows that you should stop while it's still time.
  • Also invoked when talking about some good sequels (Mario, Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, Street Fighter...) but the video is about bad sequels (Prince of Persia 2 and Alex Kidd 3).
• Series Continuity Error: During the fake RPG fight at the end of the third RPG special video, the elf girl is labeled as "Sylvain". While the video does contain Sylvain elves, she is not supposed to be one of them.
• Serious Business:
  • Often discussed during the old anime/cartoon specials, especially when a protagonist does ludicrous or self-destructive things simply to do a relatively mundane thing.
  • In the 6^th generation special, Seb identifies the Beverly Hills Cop theme as "Crazy Frog". In response, Fred pulls out the shotgun.
  • "The Console Wars" has Seb and Fred kidnap the mailman to deliver a multi-hour lecture on the respective superiority of Sega and Nintendo consoles.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
  • After playing through Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III, he goes back in time to steal these games from himself so that he would never have played them. In the timeline he created, he has reviewed My Little Pony on the Game Boy Advance instead.
  • After finishing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES, he plays the Song of Time, goes back to his childhood and gets a different game as a present. It's Dark Castle.
• Sex Sells: Briefly discussed in the video game commercials special. In the Nineties in France, video games' intended demographic was male children and male teenagers, so fanservice was omnipresent in commercials, whether it fits the advertised game (Rumble Roses, Dead or Alive) or not (Destruction Derby 2).
  Fred: That's simple, those ads were made by old men in offices who only ask themselves one question...
  Executive in a meeting: How do you give a hard-on to a child?
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The fantasy arc of the 11 Years of JdG dyptich. After a long journey to reach Xak Xaroth, the party eventually reaches the place... Which isn't a dungeon they could loot but just an inn, though the Sage's plan since the beginning was to earn money by gambling in Xak Xaroth. Then they immediately lose all their money from their first bet.
• She Is All Grown Up: Invoked in his review of The Addams Family, where he mentions how good the actress who played Wednesday (Christina Ricci) looks as an adult.
• Shell-Shock Silence: When after a lame and badly timed joke from Seb, an enraged JdG pulls the boom mike down and screams in it. It is not complete silence though, we can hear Seb complaining about his ears hurting, and JdG saying he had it coming.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: In their second Sea of thieves live, after half a dozen tries, all but one of them ending with their ship being sunk, the crew finally manage to defeat flameheart and are ready to grab the loot... then the Kraken appears, kills them and sink their ship, and before they can think of going back for the loot, the server resets.
• Shout-Out: Enough to deserve their own page.
• Shower of Angst: After going through Brad Stallion, specifically having sex with a sheep.
• Shown Their Work: During the animated intro in The Legend of Zelda: Faces of Evil video, Hylian runes can be seen. They contain actual messages (and most of them are pretty snarky).
• Shut Up, Kirk!: When playing The You Testament, JdG's character (modeled on Broly) runs out of Sanity Meter right next to Jesus and (now outside player control) attacks him. Jesus responds with an epic speech on how lashing out when you're hurt will only hurt you more... and then the character resumes attacking Jesus.
• Sidekick: Seb (Sébastien Rassiat), one of his friends who helps him make the videos and frequently plays a role in it.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: invoked Papy Grenier's episode about Final Fantasy VII mocks this, with the main characters being shown in a roller coaster when they're supposed to chase Sephiroth.
• Simpleton Voice:
  • Seb's voice gradually evolved into this. A Q&A special even asked if that was his real voice...
    Seb: [in a young female voice] Haha... of course not, THIS is my real voice.
  • During the Lion King part of the Disney video, JdG makes the whole review with this kind of voice.
• Singing Mountie: In Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, after the player character had to do random jobs in the previous levels, Fred announces the level will now make them become "a lumberjack". Cue a montage of Fred making a "thumbs up" gesture while standing in front of the choir of Mounties from Monty Python's sketch "The Lumberjack Song".
• Singing Voice Dissonance: During his review of Ai Shite Night, he notes that Sheila has a nice speaking voice — then Head Desk when he starts to sing, and rants how he sounds like the cat while Go Kato is gushing about how beautiful he sounds.
• A Sinister Clue: In one of the DC Comics adaptations episode, there is a flashback during which JdG reminds that Seb holding his boom pole with the wrong hand should have been a warning that something was wrong. The episode began with Seb dressed (and acting) like the Joker.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: He once lampshaded how often he use the F word. Although, to be fair, he is much less this than the AVGN.
• Skyward Scream: At the end of the TMNT NES review, Fred screams toward the sky in anguish.
• Slasher Movie: Parodied in the Mid-Review Sketch of the Castlevania video, where the victims are vampires attending Dracula's party, killed one by one by Simon ("Trevor!") Belmont.
• Sleazy Politician: The premise of the "Moi, President" series is the entirely unlikable Jean-Michel Asshat ("Not my real name, but that's what you'll be calling me.") running France as the President's adviser (and with zero respect for said President, the voters, the government officials...). According to him, he's doing his best to save the country while Surrounded by Idiots and Ungrateful Bastards.
• Slime, Snails, and Mutant Tails: The second ad specials has a sequence about this kind of toys. Fred ends the sequence by a fake ad about a fictional toy imagined to be the ultimate toy for boys: a combination of slime, weaponized cars, and dinosaurs.
• Snap Back: Seb is shot a few times by JdG snapping, usually after making one lame pun too many. Of course, he's fine by the next video. Lampshaded once:
  JdG: Didn't I kill you in the previous episode?
  Seb: Hey, we're in an Internet video show, it isn't supposed to be logical.
• Sociopathic Hero: Both Duck-Man and Night Eagle have no problem brutally slaughtering mooks and criminals. At one point, they even maim a class of fourth graders playing laser tag after confusing them with the Big Bad's henchmen. They don't even seem to realize that these are children and continue their slaughter even after the villain verbally clarified that the kids are not his men.
• Something Something Leonard Bernstein: Seb tries to sing the opening tune of Les Minipouces: "Nous les Minipouces nananana enfant nananana enfant!".
• So Okay, It's Average: Fred's opinion on Duke Nukem Forever, which he reviews as flawed and generic, but not exactly a bad game.invoked
• Sophisticated as Hell: In the Nightmare Circus review, to describe the total randomness of the game at times.
  JdG: The game does whatever it wants, it is free as a rose petal floating in the spring breeze. [beat] That fucker.
• Sore Loser:
  • In the 2nd "Fighting Games" video, we have Dorian from 3615 Usul who spits on Usul offscreen after losing to him, and Seb who's beating up the console with a baseball bat.
    Seb: Stop! Spamming! The fireballs!
  • Fred himself as the JdG often throws a tantrum whenever he fails at a particular game. Though considering the games he has to play, it's hard to blame him. He also downplays it in his regular let's plays, usually by claiming he doesn't understand the controls or blaming random mechanics.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • JdG doesn't find "Life in the City" to be fitting to Sonic R. He thinks it'd rather suit a Rhythm Game at a seaside nightclub.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Faces of Evil:
    JdG: If I was in 1984, in a nightclub called "The Macumba Night", I could eventually maybe think the music is good. Tough luck, I am playing a video game about Zelda right now. And I think it is slightly off-topic!
  • In Airwolf, he notes how the music in one of the game's versions^note Airwolf II on Amstrad CPC sounds awesome but only plays in the most boring parts of the game. He compares it to putting epic music in an elevator, cue a skit with him going in an elevator that has "Dragon Rider" playing in it.
  • Excalibur 2555 A.D has a kind of techno-ish soundtrack making the levels sounds like every part of the game was happening in the immediate surrounding of a night-club.
  • Asterix and the Great Rescue set to techno music.
  • Played for laughs in the video where he reviews Timecop among other things: JdG demonstrates how music should fit the situation by showing a counter-example: Aerith's death scene set to Les Musclés' "Merguez Partie". The music pops up once again later in the video, when JdG starts talking about how horrible diabetes is.
  • In the Smurfs video, when he flips a switch and the ominous music switches to "La Cucaracha" inside the bomber flying to the Smurfs village.
  • The GIGN one has hilariously inappropriate music, which he thinks would be better suited to a commercial for insurance or dog food. Especially the Game Over screen.
  • The Robin Hood NES game has very upbeat music playing over Duncan telling Robin about the torture of his father. The skit version even has Robin dancing along to the music.
    Seb: They came a disemboweled him, hanged him with his own guts, they farted on them, it was his birthday — WILL YOU CUT THAT OUT!
• Speaking Simlish: Logically, in some parts of the SimCity video. Including a Hitler Rants parody spoken in Simlish.
• Special Edition Title:
  • The Superheroes special has a Sixties-themed Joueur du Grenier intro.
  • The Takeshi's Challenge two-episode review has a special title sequence, parodying anime openings as much as possible.
• Special Effect Failure: In-Universe.
  • Parodied in the beginning of the Spirou video, when they explore the abandoned Peruvian tomb.
    JdG: And this is the edge of the green screen where we shoot our special effects.
  • Also mentioned when Grenier talks about Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
    JdG: Yeah, don't laugh, the special effects are made by a French company.
• Spin-Off: Papy Grenier, where he plays an old storyteller who revisits classic games in a humorous way.
• Split-Screen Phone Call: Parodied in the RPG review, where the Elder can reach for JdG through the split.
• Spoiler Title: The punchline of the Bait-and-Switch opening for the Phoenix Games episode (a musical sequence introducing the long-awaited second Disney-themed video is followed by Fred finding a bad Disney knock-off) is spoiled right away by the video's title, as Phoenix Games is infamous for exactly that.
• Spoofy-Doo: The Mid-Review Sketch of the Scooby-Doo episode consists in the Scooby-Gang investigating a museum, and the silliness of the franchise is drastically increased. Fred is an idiot (and is eventually revealed to be the real villain after a parody of the usual unmasking scene - he even had an accomplice, which was another Fred), the reason the museum is currently closed is completely mundane and sensible (it's 11 pm on a Sunday), the villain's scheme is to raze the museum to build another museum at the same place, Daphne and Fred's body language hint at them hating each other^note This is a remnant from an earlier version of the script, where Fred and Daphne had very recently broken up and regularly throw bitter words at each other, and Velma is so frustrated by the other members' stupidity she's alcoholic.
• Squat's in a Name: The reveal at the end of the Indiana Jones video has Archibald Von Grenier confessing to Fred he isn't using his real name. Fred then notices Von Grenier's initials are "AVGN" (while The Angry Video Game Nerd theme's first notes are played in the soundtrack). It immediately turns out Von Grenier isn't the Angry Video Game Nerd but the fake identity of an alien.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Subverted in the Airwolf review, where The Grim Reaper disappears from his sight but then comes back, claiming he was just packing his stuff. Then JdG himself pulls one on The Grim Reaper for no particular reason.
  Grim Reaper: There are some really weird people around here.
• Stealth Pun: The Tomb Raider game features a thief in bright red clothing named Carmen, who runs into the skeletons of Diego and Dora, and says she'll have to do without him from now on. In French, "Carmen Sandiego" is phonetically identical to "Carmen sans Diego" ("Carmen without Diego").
• Stepford Smiler: The spokesperson from the insurance company in "Code Bleu" smile and talk like he is in the middle of an ad, the head doctor even thinks he is a robot.
• Stereotype Reaction Gag: After failing to beat the infamous Silver Surfer (1990), he invites in a Japanese gamer, so he can clear the game with his Asian superhuman gaming skills. Except "Mr. Nakajima" is really named François Lebreton, was born in France, and is really, really annoyed by the whole thing. He still beats it in a matter of seconds.
• Sting: In the TMNT special, we actually see Seb on the drums playing a rimshot for Grenier's joke.
• Stock Control Settings: JdG is not pleased that the Start button, instead of pausing, switches the type of punches in Rise of the Robots. He has his reasons, since it means there is no longer a Pause feature.
  JdG: Start, is PAUSE! Ever since it existed, the Start button was always meant to PAUSE!
• Storybook Opening: Spoofed at the beginning of the Disney games video.
• String Theory: Grenier is reduced to connect with strings the plot elements of the Japanese Spider-Man series to make heads or tails of the first episode's story. Problem, he has no idea where Spider-Man fits in all of this.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: Two in the Nightmare Circus video, the first appearing as It Was There I Swear, and the second revealing something far more horrifying: Benzaie.
  Seb: Oh my God a ghost!
  Benzaie: Oh, hi! You wouldn't know where the exit is? I don't even know what I'm doing here!
  Seb: Oh my God a cameo!
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: He notices in the Takeshi's Challenge video that the way to progress in the game (quit your job without taking the resignation indemnity, drink in bars until you pass out, then go home, beat your family, and demand divorce) makes no sense. Zigzagged because the game also have some elements of Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay (not learning the local language before going to the islands blocks you because you can't understand what the locals are saying, one riddle requires to wet a sheet of paper and don't touch the paddle for an amount of time equivalent to how long paper would turn dry in real life).
• Stunned Silence: After dying in Captain Planet, Fred looks at the screen with a blank look on his face, then his controller... and then the insults start.
• Sudden Anatomy: Side material includes animatics based on (tabletop or video) gaming sessions. In these, characters' arms tend to disappear when not in use.
• Sudden Musical Ending:
  • The ending of the Dragon Lair review, a pastiche of the Arsenic Cake song from the French animated film Asterix and Cleopatra.
  • The ending of the DC Comics adaptation games review, with Seb singing a pastiche of "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid.
  • The Valentine episode ends with a list of porn games they won't review, sung on the tune of "We Didn't Start the Fire".
• Sudden Videogame Moment: "Games and Metal" includes a fight scene made to look like a gameplay sequence from a rail-shooter with digitized sprites.
• Suicide as Comedy: In the Téléchat episode, he notes that the opening theme of the show (a slow saxophone solo) sounds like it was composed by a depressed alcoholic person, and then sings along: "I'd want to jump from the roof, and violently hit the ground below!"
• Super Hero: Duck-Man
• Super Mode: "Super Grenier de l'espace" (Super Space Attic Gamer), a play on "Super Guerrier de l'espace", which is how Super Saiyans were called in the French dub. His "transformation" is triggered after building up too much anger and frustration because of Excalibur 2555 A.D., complete with Gohan's SSJ2 theme playing in the background, as Seb and Merlin (also played by Seb) comment on his "power"... Which allows him to beat games at a ludicrous speed, win at a game of checkers, find Waldo, turn the game off, watch a movie and brush his teeth before going to bed.
• Super-Scream:
  • At the end of The Legend of Zelda: Faces of Evil review, after finding out the game didn't save the previous day, Grenier's frustrated yell causes a building to collapse.
  • An extended gag features him as a Skyrim protagonist, whose Thu'ums are powered by swearing.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Often used for parody.
  • On playing a Road Runner game that requires you to move as slowly as you can to avoid obstacles, Fred mentions that it'd be like playing a Mario game where you can't jump. Cue Mario jumping from a block six feet off the ground and breaking his leg.
    Mario:Mamma mia! I broke-a my leg!
    Luigi: Mamma mia! Mario, you fell! Here, take-a this mushroom.
    Mario: I do not-a WANT your mushroom you stupid asshole my leg is-a broken! Get me a doctor!
  • In the opening of the Hook/Beetlejuice episode, Fred is the host for Un dîner presque parfait (French equivalent of Come Dine With Me), and makes a Hook-themed evening. Which consists in a make-believe meal followed by an insult contest. The guests don't get it is based on a film and just believe Fred is insane.
  • The sponsored ad at the beginning of the first part of the 11th Anniversary video has Captain NordVPN promoting his product next to a ticking bomb next to a tied woman, which prevents him to actually save the woman because the bomb goes off. Then, the sponsored ad at the beginning of the second part has Captain NordVPN tried for the homicide of the aforementioned woman, and the recording of the previous ad serves as proof against him.
  • The second World of Tanks sponsored ad features Fred as a Nazi officer scolding a child playing with a toy tank in a park. The child runs to a cop.
  • The Robin Hood parody has a scene where Marian sends a messenger pigeon to warn Robin Hood of the Sheriff's plan. Not a written message carried by the pigeon, but an oral message the bird is supposed to repeat. Robin didn't receive the message, because people aren't able to talk to animals...
• Sweetness Aversion: invoked In the special about girly shows, the first thing JdG asks Seb is to add a very... special effect on the screen (which mercifully doesn't last the whole episode).
  JdG: So today, we're gonna have animated shows for girls. Seb, turn this show into something pink and boring for chicks, please! [cue a blur effect appearing] ...Ah, it's not enough. Add more cute things. [cue Seb throwing kittens in the fire] Okay. It's pink, blurry and disgusting. We're in a girly show alright.
• Synthetic Voice Actor: Used for Pepito/Granolax, the evil alien octopus plushie from the "Tshai-Nese" empire (not actually related to our own Chinese people). ^note "Shi-Nwa" in the original French.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: The "Games and Metal" episode features two scenes of musical duel, in which Thrash Metal (Fred and Seb) beats Hair Metal, Black Metal beats Thrash Metal, and Hair Metal beats Black Metal.
• Take That!:
  • In the Raid 2020 review:
    JdG: Winners fight drugs. Except him. [cuts to a photograph of Lance Armstrong]
  • On the simulation special: "Well no, I'm a train driver. I'm on strike." (Train employees are extremely notorious for going on strike in France.)
  • In the same video, to introduce Rulers of Nations:
    Seb: Hey, you're cheating!
    JdG: [suddenly in a suit, imitating Nicolas Sarkozy's voice] Well, what should I have done, Mr Seb? Giving this money to young hooded punks who sing Islamic rap?
    Seb: You're fucking with me, aren't you.
    JdG: ... You're right! I've become a politician!
  • In the FAQ video, regarding road maintenance and repair: "Look at how realistic this is! You got one guy busting his ass doing all the work and the other three doing jack shit! Just like in real life."
  • In the first RPG episode, he says that fights in Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance are more boring than an episode of 7th Heaven. Cue a Gasp! and Fred insisting he said that.
  • In the Disney games review, he mentions that Beauty and the Beast on Mega Drive is as empty as the conference about the PS4 was. From the same review, he sarcastically says that Activision isn't the kind of company that would make money by selling games you can finish in an hour. Also, during the "Hakuna Matata" parody, he asks to the two French video-testers who entered in his home to sing:
    JdG: What are you doing in my place?
    Dorian: We're squatting your video.

  It is probably targeted to a very vocal minority who very regularly criticizes the new videos because of the cameos, especially the cameos of those two specific testers.

  • When asked if he'd found a worse dub than the French version of Fist of the North Star, we're shown a few scenes from the French-dubbed Superfriends.
    Jdg: Yes. You can always find worse.
  • Has a big Take That towards the American army in the Platoon / Metal Gear episode: he tries to show that having a Karma Meter in a game where you are an American soldier at war is hypocritical... because of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. Yeah.
  • In the "Thanks" part of the closing credits for the Superheroes special, he thanks "The NESBlog Mafia". NESBlog is a French videogame-themed network of videomakers, of which JdG is part (as most of the regular characters appearing as cameos). "The NESBlog Mafia" is not a Take That! addressed to NESBlog but to the vocal minority already targeted in the "we're squatting your video" joke (see above): the "NESBlog Mafia" phrase comes right from them.
  • In the DC adaptations review, he sums up his opinion of Batman Forever with a scream. When he notes that the game itself, however, may not be that bad, he is told that it uses the same engine and gameplay as Mortal Kombat. Cue another scream.
  • In the Papy Grenier Mass Effect episode, he has yet another jab at EA: "It was in 2007; that was well before Electronic Arts became a subsidiary of the drug cartels..."
  • Averted in the Police Simulator video, where increasing security measures (a cop in front of ever building, two cop cars per street, cameras every 25 feet, two precincts just down the street from each other), he doesn't make a single joke about political implications (except the mayor saying that to combat crime and unemployment they'll hire more cops and arrest this Unemployment person).
  • Plenty in "El Presidente", either aimed at American or French politics.
    El Presidente: Didn't you sign the Geneva convention?
    CIA Spy: Yes, but we don't follow it.
  • The Rambo video is a huge jab at the state of YouTube in 2017-2018, accused of favoritism in favor of channels posting lots of short and low-quality-content videos (with a special jab towards vlogs and pranking channels) at the expense of channels with high-effort high-quality content.
  • On a meta sense, every time he is accused of leaning to the right (mainly because of his jokes towards all kind of races and religions and his open attitude towards sponsored content), expect him to double down just to piss people off.
  • In the Papy Grenier "Cyberpunk 2077" episode:
    • The episode has a running gag of describing the game's notorious AI problems and bugs (notably floating objects) as really happening In-Universe.
    • A description of the streets:
      Papy Grenier: We couldn't walk three meters without running into porn ads. It was like being on YouTube.
    • At the end, Papy Grenier tells his grandchildren that his story has no ending, and they scold him for telling them an unfinished story, mocking the game's infamous lack of finishing.
  • The Fort Boyard video has one of the contestants identify himself as a card-carrying member of the Front National (the main French far-right party). He's then shown to be an utter dumbass and a wifebeater.
  • Two in the Tomb Raider video:
    • The Angel of Darkness is set in Paris and Fred notes the locals are portrayed as jerks. He immediately adds this part of the game is an accurate depiction.
    • The video's Mid-Review Sketch Show is one big Take That! to YouTube's monetization policies.
  • Phoenix Games features an extended jab at Micromania (effectively the French equivalent to Gamestop, to the point the latter actually purchased the former) and their increasingly annoying policies, including grossly overpriced games and focus on Funko Pops.
  • The idol game manager has Fred mention that an idol was forced to apologize to her fans for having a boyfriend, adding that said fans want idols to be virgins...
    JdG: Just like them.
  • Fred doesn't hide his disdain towards Velma in the Scooby-Doo episode, calling it an attempt to kill the franchise.
• Teacher's Pet: House Nintendor to Headmaster Albus Humblebundledore.
  Humblebundledore: For being wrong and wrongly accusing a teacher, but believing thoroughly in her mistake, five hundred points to Texas Granger. For understading the plot and performing a successful hit-and-run, five hundred points to Henry Butter. And to that chick over there, because she's hot as fuck and because I can do whatever I want, TEN BILLION POINTS FOR NINTENDOOOOOOR!
• Tear Jerker: invokedThe second special is about old shows and cartoons from the '80s and '90s and one of the video's themes is about how some of those (the Nobody's Boy: Remi anime, Princess Sarah, Western Animation/Clementine) were dark or depressing.
  Fred: Damn, even the voice-over seems on the verge of killing itself!^note About a character's death in Nobody's Boy: Remi.
• Tempting Fate: Often.
  • In the girly shows special, when discussing the use of the Almost Dead Guy trope in Lady Georgie.
    JdG: Good God, we all know he's gonna kick the bucket before spitting out her father's name! [when that happens] Damn! Is it possible to have something more silly than that?! [My Little Pony's theme rolls] ... NOOOOOO!
  • In the 2013 "Fighting Games" video:
    JdG: [to Seb] Why are you looking at me like that? I hope you aren't thinking about creating a montage of all our racist jokes with a Lord of the Rings music!
    Seb: I'm not.
    [said montage was shown right before these lines (but with the music from "They're taking the Hobbits to Isengard", so Seb is arguably right)]
  • After a particularly disturbing commercial of an anatomically correct peeing boy doll, he really hopes that's the worst of humanity's rejects. Cut to a pregnant Barbie commercial.
  • In the Dragon Ball review, he mentions that the game is at least somewhat faithful to the series, covering the events of the original manga pretty well. Bulma being kidnapped by a pterodactyl, the meetings with Master Roshi (though Bulma showing her panties was censored to have her give him her meal), Oolong and Yamcha, the adventures in Pilaf's castle... then he gets to the part where Goku goes to the Moon to defeat a white rabbit, which never happened in the manga.^note This level is based on the ending of the Boss Rabbit mini-arc, but it's a huge stretch on the game's part as Goku went to the moon to bring the rabbit there and came back in a few panels.
  • Similarly, Fred mentions in the Robin Hood episode that the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves NES adaptation is at least faithful to the plot of the movie. Then a boss fight against a giant skeleton happens.
  • The conclusion of the Eggman Hates Furries segment of the Jeux en Vrac about Sonic fangames:
    Fred: See, it's not difficult to make a good Sonic fangame without creepy sexual fet—
    [cue Sonic and Tails kissing in the ending cutscene]
    Fred: GODDAMMIT INTERNET!
• Terrible Interviewees Montage: The episode on Daikatana shows a montage of the newly minted Ion Storm interviewing candidates for developer positions. One of the interviewers gets so desperate he decides to interview his dog.
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • In the sport games review:
    JdG: The Jaguar tried to penetrate the market with its 64 bits^note "bit" is pronounced the same as the French word for "dick"... [video reeling back] That console presented itself as the first 64-bit console.
  • In the TMNT special:
    JdG: Relatively speaking, the racism was okay... [beat] That's absolutely not what I meant.
  • Duke Nukem Forever: After saying that in previous games at least, the women didn't talk, Fred realizes what he said and clarifies that it prevented them from spouting innuendo-filled idiocies.
• That One Level: In-Universe: The snow level in Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Especially a part of it, which he calls "The Passage":
  JdG: Yes, the The Passage, you know about The Passages, every hard game has one, that hard part of a level which makes you want to headbutt your girlfriend and run naked on a speedway!
• Theme Naming: Commented in the Deus video, in which the antagonists have names like Pavlov 95, Marx 49, Pythagoras 32, Socrates 19... which results in Fred wondering if the game is supposed to be set on the online chat of a philosophy college. At the end of the video, when encountering a final boss named "Cyberfranck", Fred tells he never heard about this philosopher.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted; JdG consults a therapist in the Smurfs episode to help with all the stress the horrible games inflict on him. Though he's probably not too useful, considering he's doodling or playing crosswords while JdG tells his story.
• There Should Be a Law: At the end of the Metal Gear review:
  JdG: Honestly, isn't there some kind of law that condemns voluntary attempts to be assholes?!
• The "The" Title Confusion: Fred isn't too sure whether the sub-title for Prince of Persia 2 is "The Shadow & Flame The" or "The The Shadow & Flame" because of its weird title positioning. (It's actually "The Shadow & the Flame".)
• They Killed Kenny Again:
  • From time to time, Seb is killed or commits suicide. He inexplicably reappears latter or in the next episode.
  • Kaedan in the Mass Effect Papy Grenier special.
• Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Finishing Airwolf on Amstrad will bring upon the unlucky gamer the wrath of Zeus. Too bad for him:
  Zeus: For your punishment, you shall review Dragon's Lair!
  JdG: No can do, I did it two months ago.
  Zeus: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?
  JdG: I did it a while ago!
  Zeus: Uh, Dark Castle?
  JdG: Already done.
  Zeus: Damn, you really have a shitty life! Uh, E.T.?
  JdG: Aw come on, it wasn't that awful!
  Zeus: And Barbie? Barbie, don't tell me you've done Barbie!
  JdG: Huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh...
  Zeus: Wah, you really had it rough.
• Third-Person Seductress: In the DC Comics adaptations episode, he speaks very quickly about the Catwoman adaptation, to say that this trope is the only interest of the game.
• Three-Point Landing:
  • In the video for the 11-year anniversary, at the start of the advertising insert, Fred as "Captain NordVPN" (a Superman Captain Ersatz) lands with a textbook superhero landing.
  • Done again in the video for the '80s series video (special Glen A. Larson), but this time, if Captain NordVPN is still a Superman Captain Ersatz, it's of the Man of Steel dark and brooding version.
• Title Theme Tune: After a few seconds of the French intro sequence of Captain Planet, Fred cuts it with "Yeah, yeah, okay, we got it!"
• To Be Continued:
  • Twice — one at the end of his sports games review, and one at the end of the Platoon and Metal Gear review.
  • Parodied in the First-Person Shooters review, with this dialogue at the end, over the credits.
    Doug Walker: You are very good, Monsieur Grenier, but now, it is time. Meet me at the hotel. [to be continued] In 8 months. [to be continued in 8 months]
    JdG: Wait a sec, 8 months?! Why not right now, I'm free at the moment!
    Doug Walker: Well I mean, right now it's the high season, so if I take tickets, it'll be a little too expensive. Now I found a low-cost flight site, but right now it's full, and there's nothing else that— hold on a second, I really have bad reception, I can barely hear ya.
    JdG: Hello? H-Hello, can you hear me? Hello?
    Doug Walker: Yeah, it's a little better, but not that great.
    JdG: Yeah, hold on, I'm walking upstairs, there you go. [footsteps sounds]
    Doug Walker: Yeah, it's definitely better, but I can hear the traffic. So, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, the flight. So, I was thinking that— [sequence ends]

  It's subverted as well, because of The Stinger that shows the two of them actually meeting.

• Toilet Humor: Used during the Toilet Tycoon part of the simulators review.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Said word-for-word in the LOTR review (see Artificial Stupidity).
  • The vampire guests in the Castlevania episodes behave like stereotypical slasher movies victims, with their antics non-exhaustively including splitting up for no good reason, mistaking their twitch viewers' warnings about Belmond for requests for songs, and not realizing that their friend is dead despite them literally seeing the body.
• Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket: The Displate ad for the D&D special features Fred as an average consumer unable to put up a poster.
• Torch the Franchise and Run: invokedWhen summarizing the story of the Tomb Raider franchise in the intro of the Tomb Raider video, Fred tells The Last Revelation ends with Lara Croft's apparent death because the developers wanted to terminate the series, being fed up with a work pace so intense (one game released per year since the first installment) they were suffering from physical and mental issues. Since they later made a prequel (Tomb Raider Chronicles) and a proper sequel (The Angel of Darkness, which is the main focus of the video), it didn't work.
• Torture Cellar: He locks some of his worst games in one. It is shown in the Dragon's Lair (in which he first goes to bring the game in his room before testing it) and The Addams Family (which ends with the torture of a chained Super Nes with the Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt cart still in it) videos.
• Totally Radical: In response to the cringe-inducing, awful attempts at ads trying this, he tells them "Man, you would have gotten stabbed if you'd tried talking like that in 2014."
• Translation Convention: Teased, but ultimately averted in the 11th Anniversary episode, with a scene of the Nerd watching a news report in French, appearing distressed over what he sees... only to lament how he doesn't understand it because he doesn't know the language.
• Trauma Inn: Lampshaded in (appropriately enough) the 2^nd RPG special, where Fred hauls the fly-infested corpse of his weeks-dead party member to an inn, and the guy wakes up two hours later.
• Travel Montage: In the beginning of the Instruments of Chaos video, JdG's search of all the Indiana Jones games uses this trope with a map of Paris's public transport.
• Troll: At the end of the Alex Kidd 3 review, JdG accuses the makers to have been trolling the gamers. Considering that the whole village level, with several quests and sub-quests involving finding numerous linked items, is actually completely irrelevant to finishing the game, he certainly has a point.
• Troubled Production: In the Duke Nukem Forever video, the actual review of the game is shorter than Fred's summary of its chaotic development. In the behind-the-scene comment of the episode, Fred tells the history of Duke Nukem Forever is actually more interesting than its actual review.invoked
• 20 Minutes into the Future: The Papy Grenier series is implied to take place in one of these, possibly as late as the 2060's; in the Hogwarts Legacy episode, we learn that the legal retirement age is 87, child labor (and child smoking!) is legal (both are satirical Take That! at unpopular pension reforms and labor code reforms in France), the Harry Potter fandom has become a (probably literal) religious cult, and an AI impersonating a now-deceased popular French singer has become president of the bunker Papy Grenier and his grandchildren live in, probably due to some catastrophe.
• Understatement: Alpha V de Gelganech's reaction to Frangipanus telling his tragic backstory involving the death of his family and the destruction of his planet is to simply say "Well... your life is no piece of cake.".
• Unexpected Character: invoked In "Strange Christmas Tapes", a distraught Santa looking for his stolen toys calls his friends for help, including his old buddy... Son Gohan. Fred was not ready for that one. ^note As it turns out, the tape was created by AB Productions, which gave them not only access to the Club Dorothée anime lineup, but also sets from AB's live-action series.
  JdG: Whoa, uh, whoa. I'm happy, but... surprised. But happy, really! But... more surprised than happy.
• Unexplained Recovery: Fred shoots Seb offscreen in Sport Games. In the next video Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, when Fred asks why is he there, he just responds that a web video doesn't have to be logical.
• Unfortunate Implications: In-Universe examples:
  • In the FAQ video. "I will make no comment on the fact that your character [a highway maintenance worker] looks like an old Pakistani immigrant."
  • In the 2^nd RPG special, where the party thief is Karim Debbache (who's of North-African descent). He promptly realizes the problem and tells the others to get fucked.
  • Behind the Maps: Hyrule has a bit of fun with the Gerudo, blaming systemic racism for their reputation as "the people of desert thieves" and not the fact that they actually are desert thieves, and claiming that Zelda has racist tendencies due to her immediate distrust of the only brown guy in the Hylian court.
• Unfortunate Search Results: After finding out about the Sun Dance ritual through Pocahontas: Princess of the American Indians, he tried to check if it was real by looking up "indian nipples", which yielded "a lot of videos... though not really all that relevant."
• Un-Installment: All game footage from his intro comes from his earliest episodes, except for the brief moment when Goonies II is shown. According to theinvoked Word of Grenier, a Goonies II review was cancelled during its production, because they felt the end result wasn't as good as the other episodes. It is finally reviewed in April 2016... except it is actually a pretty good game, so Grenier immediately switches to X-Perts, after just quickly pointing out a few flaws.
  JdG: And I swear, this fucking game... is perfectly okay, what's the problem?
• Unreadably Fast Text:
  • During his Ninja Turtles review, a fake ad for the "low hitpoints alert" sound sold as a ringtone is shown. During the ad, a line of text is scrolling at the bottom of the screen, saying, "Really? You have nothing better to do other than reading this scrolling text?"
  • The 2^nd RPG special has "If you paused the video to read this, buy yourself a social life."
• Unreliable Voiceover: JdG's voiceover warmly thanks Seb for finding extra controllers so he can finish a detestable game after his own breaks down. The images on screen show him running after Seb with a rifle in hand.
• Unusual Euphemism: In a sketch of JdG as a father with his kid watching Cool World, he tries to explain what's going on the screen with "Well, you see, the lady, as we say around here, her Garonne is flooding..." And no, the euphemism doesn't sound any less weird in French (even knowing the Garonne is a river in the south of France).
• Unwinnable Joke Game: Minus the "joke" part. JdG considers Street Fighter flat-out impossible to finish because the final boss demolishes you with next to no room to counter-attack.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Invoked in the second commercial special, about an ad showing a boy playing with a fake workshop and a girl with a fake kitchen. He comments that values were different in the '70s... except the ad aired in 1999.
    JdG: Well, err, '70s, '90s... it's just numbers!
  • Invoked again in the Special about AB Production's series, about the offensive racist stereotypes, the sheer pervertedness of the men, etc.
    JdG: But you gotta note that the things I'm making fun of now were considered perfectly normal at the time, and that if I was doing this joke back then, the only reaction I'd have gotten would have been a "yes, and?"
• Vampire Vords: In Castlevania, Dracula (played by Seb) speaks with a mock Slavic accent. Every other vampire character in the video (including his own son Alucard) speak with no accent.
• Video Game 3D Leap: He dedicated an entire video to this, mostly focusing on games such as Bubsy 3D.
• Video Game Perversity Potential:
  • In-Universe, in the Papy Grenier episode about GoldenEye for the N64. He says that he used to take advantage of the fact that bullet impacts on the walls took a long time to disappear to "draw" penises.
  • Discussed in the Bazar video where he plays AI Dungeon 2. When describing the game's premise, Fred explains it has a Not Safe for Work setting he experimented with for a while offscreen, and it is perfectly functional. During the proper game, he flies to the dragon's nest by using his penis as a helicopter's propeller.
    Fred: You can create your own twisted story filled with BDSM and bondage if you want, it works!
• Viking Funeral: Used as a Framing Device for the TMNT special: Grenier and Seb perform such a funeral for the whole Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, which they consider has been killed by the slew of poor adaptations.
• Villain Song: In the Disney games review, the devs and CEO of Infogrames have one, based on Scar's song from The Lion King.
• Visual Pun:
  • In the Papy Grenier episode about Roller Coaster Tycoon, when at the end Grenier phones home and casually says that he lost another business again, he is suspended to a golden parachute.
  • In the embassy party in the Mission Impossible video, when Fred enters the server room, he's greeted by two waiters ("server" and "waiter" are the same word in French). In the same scene, the nibbles look like tiny ovens (the French word for a nibble is "petit four", which literally means "small oven"). In the same video, he comes into possession of a microfilm, which is an ant-sized VHS. Which he watches on an ant-sized TV while nibbling on ant-sized popcorn.
  • The sponsored ad for zombie game State of Survival (opening of the ER-themed Jeux en Vrac) uses a similar "server-waiter" gag: when Seb mentions one of the game's features is "server vs server" PVP, this is illustrated onscreen by two waiters hitting each other with their tray.
  • In the Daikatana video, at one point Fred says, "I'm going to be transparent with you..." Only for him to turn translucid, grinning at his own joke.
• Vocal Evolution: Fred's voice became softer and more high-pitched when he lost weight, which also affected his comedic style somewhat (he screams less, for example). His southern accent also became less pronounced after he moved to Brittany. When commenting his earlier videos, Fred mentions his voice was more nasal in because he often was sick with a cold when he was fat.
• Vorpal Pillow: He attempts to smother his Master System with a pillow after playing The Flintstones.
• Vulgar Humor: He describes Brad Stallion to be so filled with vulgar jokes and sex-related puns that would be quite similar to a kid throwing every swear word he can think of.
• Unwitting Pawn: The reveal at the end of Castlevania. Alucard's evil plan consisted in riling up their neighbor Trevor Belmont (by bribing a local craftman to ensure the latter made a shody noise isolation job, by crowing like a rooster every morning, and by slightly disrupting the devices used during the party to make sure they're barely above the maximum allowed sound level) until he snaps and kills Dracula. It backfired.
• "Wanted!" Poster: There's one for Duck-Man at the beginning of the DC Comics games review. Then it's ripped off, revealing another wanted poster for... ham. Covering a poster asking to stop ripping posters.
• We Didn't Start the Billy Joel Parodies: His Valentine's Day episode ends with one of these, where Grenier lists off the games he thought were too gross to properly review.
• Weird Crossover: Invoked in the Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac review in Club JdG. After pointing several times that the plot combines Saint Seiya-esque elements (armors, magical powers, etc.) and stuff like mundane elite soldiers wielding assault rifles, tanks, attack helicopters, etc., Fred wonders if the plot has been written by a kid who was playing at the same time with two different collections of toys. Cue a Saint Seiya action figure next to a Action Man one.
• Welcome to Corneria:
  • Averted in the Alex Kidd review, where trying to get past the guard three times results in him stabbing you. Cut to a Mass Effect-like dialogue tree, where Seb talks to JdG just to end the conversation immediately, and on the third try JdG shoots him.
  • Also parodied in the RPG video, after the Greybeard is done delivering his information.
    Greybeard: Go and accomplish your mission. And now I'm going to repeat the same line every time you talk to me.
    [Grenier pokes him]
    Hi, Swearborn! Has there been any progress in your quest?
    [Grenier pokes him again]
    Hi, Swearborn! Has there been any progress in your quest?
  • Discussed in the 2^nd RPG video where he notes that the developers of Super Hydlide didn't even bother to do that for most of the NPCs, resulting in a lot of people answering with "!?......", which he represents with a Tim Taylor-esque grunt.
    Greybeard: So, Swearborn, has there been any progress in your quest?
    JdG: !?......
• Well, This Is Not That Trope: The Takeshi's Challenge video starts with Grenier recounting the legend of Susanoo in rough Japanese, before ending mid-story and saying "This video is not about that."
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: Said word-for-word when he discusses the fact that Cryo was already known for bad games before making Asterix & Obelix vs. Caesar.
• What Does This Button Do?: JdG pushes a random button in Kang and Kodos's flying saucer at the end of the Bart vs. the Space Mutants review.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?:invoked His main issue with Téléchat. A slow-paced, Surreal Humor-based satire of the news industry is a cool idea; but as a kid with no attention span who didn't get any of the satire and just wanted to watch cartoons, it was more or less torture.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • RPG 2 and RPG 3 feature an evil sorcerer introduced as The Man Behind the Man but who never interacts with the main characters. The Anniversary video, a sequel/finale for several story arcs including the RPG videos, doesn't feature him.^note Since they're both antagonists played by Bob Lennon, some viewers speculated the sorcerer was George Yunohu.
  • In the 11th Anniversary episode, the ending of the first part has George Yunohu captured by Lord Thanus. The second part doesn't reveal his fate.
  • In the Castlevania episode, the Grim Reaper disappears from the story once Trevor Belmont attacks Dracula's party, instead of fighting Belmont. The Grim Reaper is a recurring boss in the Castlevania series.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Occasionally done in the Mid-Review Sketch Show. Note that it isn't always parodying the franchise/work the reviewed games are based on. It' also the premise of Papy Grenier.
  • Jurassic Park: Jurassic Park.
  • Platoon & Metal Gear: Rambo III.
  • The first RPG special: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
  • Young Indiana Jones: The Indiana Jones franchise. With a twist ending inspired by Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
  • Unsorted #2: Special Movies^note Hook and Beetlejuice: The pre-credit scene is a parody of the French equivalent of Come Dine With Me, while the proper episode is a parody of Hook and Peter Pan.
  • Terminator: The Terminator.
  • Friday the 13th — Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde: The Shining.
  • Star Wars: A New Hope.
  • The Sixth Generation of Console Video Games: The Matrix.
  • Ghostbusters: Ghostbusters.
  • Harry Potter : Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
  • Rambo: While most of the review is about an adaptation of Rambo: First Blood Part II, the Mid-Review Sketch Show is parodying First Blood.
  • Robin Hood: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
  • Fort Boyard: Fort Boyard.
  • Ecco the Dolphin: Interstellar.
  • Enter the Matrix: The Matrix Reloaded.
  • Games and Metal: Brütal Legend.
  • Mission: Impossible: Mission Impossible.
• Wholesome Crossdresser:
  • In Mission: Impossible, Fred sneaks into a embassy under a very convincing female disguise thanks to Latex Perfection.^note In real life, he's played by a female extra up to the moment he removes his disguise
  • The Harry Potter and 11th Anniversary videos feature Benzaie, shaved and dressed like a British highschool girl, playing a Hermione counterpart.
• The Whole World Is Watching: Played for Laughs whenever sports anime comes up, the stadiums always seem full to bursting over unimportant matches of minor leagues.
  • The Let's Play of Captain Tsubasa goes the Serial Escalation route, with junior soccer matches being broadcast to 145 countries, then 3 galaxies, then 4 parallel universes.
  • The Beyblade special points out that the stadiums are filled to capacity despite no-one being able to see the spinning tops.
• Who Writes This Crap?!:
  • In a fake movie trailer at the end of the Virus review, after saying a horribly lame pun on the word "mal" (in this context, "evil", not "hurt". Well...).
    "Evil has returned... And it will hurt!"
  • The plot of Virus is implied to be written by a kid during a redaction exercise in school, and then bought by the CEO of Mauvais Jeux Inc.
• A Winner Is You: A common bad point in the games he reviews. Especially blatant in The Addams Family: Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt, in which it overlaps with Easy-Mode Mockery: finishing the game in a low difficulty level grants a A Winner Is You ending suggesting to beat the game in a higher difficulty mode. The true ending is also A Winner Is You, with a different short text. JdG doesn't take it very well...
• Word Salad Title: When he reviews Elite Force: Navy Seals, Grenier suspects that there is a random title generator for crappy FPSs.
• The Worst Seat in the House: Lampshaded in the Beyblade review; the tops are maybe an inch wide, what exactly are the people in the top seats supposed to do?
  Fan: WOHHH-OHHH, WOHHH-OHHH, WOHHH-OHHH WE CAN'T SEE SQUAT!
• Worthless Treasure Twist: In Tomb Raider: Search for the Mysterious Green Dollar, the titular treasure (read: Youtube's "video monetized" logo) is real and is everything the rumors say it is... but its ownership has so many rules and requires giving up so many freedoms that the main characters decide it just isn't worth it. Laurent does steal a water cooler from the Youtube office as a consolation prize, though.
• Would Rather Suffer:
  • Fred has this to say about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:
    JdG: You'll have to cut my balls with rusty shears drenched in vinegar before I'd admit that the fourth movie is part of the saga!
  • Also, in JdG: La Revanche for Dragon's Lair:
    JdG: I am as eager to play this game than to cut off my own balls with a shovel...
• Wrestler in All of Us: About midway through his review of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Grenier is already upset enough that he grabs his NES and puts it through a wrestling move while wearing a Lucha Libre mask.
• X Called; They Want Their Y Back: In the fourth episode of the narrative Let's Play for Captain Tsubasa, after yet another physics-defying goal...
  Commentator: Gravity called, it would like to know what the fuck you're doing!
• Xtreme Kool Letterz: In the Papy Grenier episode about RollerCoaster Tycoon, he tries to name his park "Kids Krazy Kingdom". The shareholders understandably find the idea... dubious.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • In Captain Planet, Fred succeeds in going through an extra-hard portion of an already difficult level... then dies on the very next trap.
  • In Hook for the NES, after going through a painful first level, he is amazed at how surprisingly good the following flying level is, before he realizes said level is also very short. He compares the experience with giving a lollipop to a child just to enjoy taking it away a few seconds later.
• You Answered Your Own Question: Fred protests Lara taking some guy's watch, especially since it serves no purpose later and she's a millionaire. Then he thinks about what he said and realizes it's perfectly logical.
• You Bastard!:
  • During the Taz-Mania review, he reacts like that when presenting the show which inspired the game... with a subversion:
    JdG: Ha ha ha... You're laughing, aren't you? Have you no shame? Seriously, haven't you noticed something shocking in this series? Taz's family can speak perfectly: his parents, his sister, his brother. They even wear clothes. And look at Taz... Look at him [the picture turns in black and white with a sad music]. He is the only one to always be naked and not to be able to speak. It's true, Taz is mentally disabled. So, stop making fun of him because... ha ha ha, this idiot is funny!
  • During one of his specials about cartoons, he shows a DVD set of My Little Pony (the older one) and angrily says to the viewers: "Look at what you made me buy!"
  • During the Prince of Persia 2 / Alex Kidd in High Tech World video, the introduction speech includes this:
    JdG: [after talking about Sequelitis, especially in video games] So, it's why I'm here, to suffer. Because you love seeing me suffering, which makes you evil human beings.
• You Don't Look Like You: Invoked. In the 11th Anniversary episode, Fred points out Alpha V de Gelganech looks a bit different than before (his face was a latex mask in previous video), and is answered the current video has a higher budget than usual.
• You, Get Me Coffee: About the SNES Jurassic Park, while commenting on how the other characters keep giving Grant missions but never appear in person to help him, we see an edited caption from Hammond demanding he'd go fetch some coffee.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: In-universe, during his review of Geo-Political Simulator: Rulers of Nations:
  JdG: This game is too hard to be beaten, so, because the situation is worsening, I decide to replace my Prime Minister François Fillon, who became unpopular, with the leader of the Beelzebub's Worshipers Sect.
  Leader of the Beelzebub's Worshipers Sect: Of course, it is well known that we are absolutely in tune with each other.
  JdG: Fuck, I'm in tune with Beelzebub, I really must be playing like crap.
• Your Mom: Implied. During the fight against Sylvain, the Swearborn uses an attack called "Ultimate Swear". While we don't get to hear the swear, the battle cuts to Sylvain telling the Swearborn: "You didn't have to say that about my mother.".
• You Shall Not Pass!: Gandalf as a nightclub bouncer (see Previously on…).
• You Were Trying Too Hard: In the Jurassic Park (Mega Drive) game, Grenier gets quite upset with the level where he has to guide Grant on a raft over several waterfalls, where even a small tumble means you die. Exasperated, he throws away the game pad... and the level continues, with Grant going through the waterfalls without a hitch.
  JdG: You needn't touch the game pad... I hate it when a game takes you for a dumbass...
• Zerg Rush: Instruments of Chaos suffers from this, with enemies attacking less than a second from the start and piling up.

---

Tropes for the Joueur du Grenier comics:

• The Faceless: Grenier's mother's face is always obscured by something.
• Face Fault: Every depiction of Grenier's mother ends with her keeling over at her progeny's latest catastrophe.
• Spin-Off Babies: The comic book, instead of focusing on video games, is about his childhood, and doesn't always involve video games or pop culture nostalgia.

---