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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.