I was watching some of Gaming Broductions’ videos about JRPG history and although I appreciate the production values and the love the brothers seem to have for old JRPGs, there’s something in the writing of their scripts that just rubs me the wrong way. It’s two-pronged:
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Vocabulary and sentence construction: Reusing the same crutches (words and phrases) again and again: “Anyways…”, “Moving on”, “unique”, “which I always thought was pretty X”, “that’s pretty cool”, “it’s pretty much X”, “awesome”, “literally and figuratively” (but one of the two adverbs makes no sense in context), “interestingly enough”, “it’s just not X”, “yeah… this is just X”, “yeah… pretty X you could say”, “I’ve come to appreciate X”, etc.
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Insight: This is the most important one. They usually don’t have anything that interesting to say about the games or the tropes they cover, they just describe them. Maybe I’m spoiled by channels like TBSkyen, ErrantSignal, Pop Culture Detective, New Frame Plus but I wish to find a JRPG channel that engages with them critically and explores their themes beyond just (sometimes) naming them.
Do you want LPs? Those I can easily give you. Chuggaaconroy has done some, HCBailly has done a bunch, so many that he’s in fact best known for playing a lot of JRPGs. Magemasher22 has played a bunch. Naka Teleeli has done some here and there. ProJared has done plenty, especially Final Fantasy, on his gameplay channel.
I’m not sure about proper essays a la skyen or new frame, though…
Thanks a lot for the recs! I’m not usually in the mood to watch LPs with commentary, but every so often I do, and I do appreciate having bookmarked channels for that purpose when that time comes. The thing is I’m even more picky about the letsplayers having something significant to say when they play the game than with the essay videos since those at least are not that big of a time sink.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be (1) though-provoking insights since that’s very hard to do on the fly (though I’d love that), but I also do appreciate people that can (2) speak about the emotions the game is eliciting in them openly and with some nuance or (3) if they have some expertise in a related area (like character design, writing, music, history, etc) share some interesting stuff from time to time. 2BSkyen manages to do all three of those so I do check his LP channel occasionally.
Do you know which of those recs you gave fits some of those best?
