Yahtzee Croshaw has a lengthly list of peeves, and its gotten longer as time passes. As he's been releasing videos weekly for over sixteen years now and trends have inevitably shifted, some of his pet peeves are elements that were extremely common trends in games across the industry at one point (so he was exposed to them very frequently), but aren't as common now.
- 100% Completion: By his own admission, he has trouble understanding the completionist mentality, as he himself couldn't care less and focuses on gameplay and story first of all. Therefore, he tends to think lowly of games like Pokémon that bank on this as their selling point. This also extends to games like Yoshi's Island and Tembo the Badass Elephant that emphasize the need to find all the secrets to "properly" complete a level. In his review of Yoshi's Crafted World, he darkly suspects that this was the start of the industry's idea to exploit the "obsessive insinct" that lead to the lootbox-infested live service games of today.
- Action-Adventure: Or as he called it, "the people moving around doing things genre." Not specifically the games in the genre, more just the fact that it exists as a genre, because pretty much any game could be considered "action-adventure", so self-identifying as it seems like the creators have no idea what their game is supposed to be about.
- Artificial Stupidity: See Fish Eyes; the fact that they're used whenever the topic of a game's AI is discussed should tell you something.
- Continuity Reboot: Reboots tend to earn his ire easily, as he considers the concept anathema to the preservation of gaming history and the lessons it teaches. Gets even worse when Recycled Title is in play, as it causes confusion between different titles.
- Doorstopper: He tends to rag on games that are heavy on dialogue and cutscenes, like Mass Effect, the Final Fantasy series and especially Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which he describes as suffering from "verbal diarrhea." Yahtzee loves a good game story, but the operative word is "game" and he hates games that regularly sit you down and force you to basically watch the most boring parts of a movie instead. This applies as much to text-heavy games like Planescape: Torment and Pillars of Eternity (though notably subverted in the case of Disco Elysium).
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Specifically, stories that put the fate of the planet on the line, especially late in the story. He describes it as a way to artificially raise the stakes, because "If they haven't come up with a single character whose goals and struggles we can actually feel invested in, they can always play the exploding planet card, because holy shit, I live on a planet!"
- Item Crafting: The sheer ubiquity of item crafting systems in both AAA and indies has led him to usually bemoan them whenever featured.
- It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Initially averted when he calls out fans of the Nintendo Hard Bionic Commando Rearmed for taking this stance, then plays it straight the rest of his career...
- Fake Difficulty: ...except when the controls suck, the AI sucks and The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard.
- It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: Tends to get his rag on when it comes to the latest industry gameplay trends, such as hero shooters, battle royale games etc., especially when it becomes too prevalent. His Ghost of Tsushima had him whine about the overexposure of "open world stealth/action with crafting and collectables", which he decided to rename to "Jimminy Cockthroat" in the same way he derisively referred to overly-linear military shooters as "spunkgargleweewee".
- It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One of his repeat criticisms of Nintendo is that they essentially keep remaking the same games over and over for each of their franchises, especially when said games don't seem to evolve the story or mechanics in any meaningful way from the older titles. New Super Mario Bros. Wii in particular got a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech calling it "a game that has absolutely no right to exist" when previous titles were ostensibly better.
- By the same token, he rails on Ubisoft for most of their games essentially being the same - a "sandbox" filled with meaningless challenge markers and too much emphasis on player freedom as opposed to structured challenge or story progression.
- Karma Meter: He argues that usually "you need to be all the way good or all the way evil to unlock the best toys" which eliminates choice and forces an evil player to do some really ridiculous things to maintain their evilness. He also argues that such meters are "just forcing us to play the game twice to see all the content", and that the game having to balance the story to account for player choice results in the main character becoming bland as a result.
- Mission-Pack Sequel: Yahtzee himself uses the term "Expansion Pack Sequel" to refer to such games. His measure of a good sequel is one that builds upon what was established by the previous game, while a bad sequel simply repeats what the first game did with very minor gameplay updates. Super Mario Galaxy 2 had him literally point the viewer to his review of the first game while slapping himself in the face and sighing in irritation. Even games he considers good, like Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, get a mark down in his eyes because "not having to design a new world map is cheating".
- Mood Dissonance: While not a huge pet peeve, he does get annoyed when a game's story/gameplay can't keep a consistent tone. His review of the 2012 Twisted Metal has him take umbrage with the way the Darker and Edgier story clashed with the over-the-top goofy violence of the gameplay, which he felt was unnecessarily limiting the audience. He would address this directly in his Extra Punctuation episode "We Need to Have a Conversation About Your Tone"
. - '90s Anti-Hero: A core gripe of his when reviewing games like Darksiders and WET. Basically, any game in which the player character has so many flaws and shortcomings that the writers forget there's supposed to be a hero in this character we're controlling.
- No Fourth Wall: If his reviews of Sunset Overdrive, Superhot and Yooka-Laylee are any indication; he's claimed it makes it hard to care about the story, it's often overused, and it's usually played as being really clever when it isn't. He notably defended Undertale's fourth-wall break, saying that it happened "'cause it had earned it. Without that, it's just annoying."
- Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo/Colon Cancer: Yahtzee dislikes game titles with a colon and a subtitle, particularly for games that are not sequels (as in Beyond: Two Souls and Lichdom: Battlemage), as he feels it's incredibly pretentious. After losing patience with the trope in the latter game, he has taken to pronouncing the colons in such titles by retching. He also has a specific dislike of game titles that use an abbreviation followed by the name in full, such as DmC: Devil May Cry.
- Oscar Bait: Has stated a dislike for games such as GRIS and Sea of Solitude, since he feels they're all poor attempts at this, following an easy formula for critical success by leaning on atmosphere and art at the expense of gameplay direction. Even games like Ori and the Blind Forest that don't skimp on gameplay, tend to rub him up the wrong way for affecting this appearance. He also notes that a lot of these games rely on similar themes (growing up, guilt, mental health etc.), but don't handle them with much subtlety (see World of Symbolism below).
- Pinball Protagonist: One of his recurring complaints is when a game tries to have a dramatic story but the main character ends up being this. Indeed, this was a lot of why he didn't like the rebooted Lara Croft, as he felt so much of her story was just being forced to do stuff and then doing it, instead of choosing to act as an extension of her character/personality.
- Press X to Not Die: Trope namer, as noted above. He has clarified that he doesn't mind (well, doesn't mind as much) Quicktime Events when they're part of the core gameplay (as in Heavy Rain), but objects when they are unexpectedly thrown into the middle of a cutscene (like Resident Evil 4), as in this trope. Ironically, despite it being one of his most notable peeves, the fact the trend is far less common after the seventh console generation means it doesn't come up as much. When the rare game appears that does have them, he makes it abundantly clear he still hates them.
- One the other hand, he soured on the Heavy Rain school of QTE where you have to use contextual button presses to do everything without even the challenge of a limited time to succeed, with the game refusing to progress until you push the button, coining the term "Slow Time Events" (in reference to the infamous "Press F to Pay Respects" scene in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare) and comparing them to watching a movie that pauses itself every few seconds so you have to repeatedly use the remote to unpause it just to keep watching.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: Nothing turns Yahtzee off a protagonist quicker than the dissonance between how the writing portrays a character and the horrible, horrible things they do in course of the plot. Naughty Dog protagonists grind his gears the most, accusing the stories of running on the philosophy of "Fuck you, got mine."
- Real Is Brown: He's rather frequently put out that everything is either grey or "dogshit brown" in "realistic" games, which makes them unappealing to look at.
- Recycled Title: He really doesn't like the trend of franchise reboots that reuse the name of the first game, such as Tomb Raider, Thief, and God of War. Illustrated in his Mortal Kombat 9 review, where he spends the first paragraph talking about the original Mortal Kombat (1992) and being confused for a while before realizing his "mistake"."DO YOU SEE HOW CONFUSING THIS GETS?!"
- Regenerating Health: He prefers health meters and medkits (this goes hand in hand with his hating cover-based combat; see below).
- Rummage Sale Reject: He often criticizes JRPGs for their eccentric costume designs, and his biggest complaint of Darksiders is the comic book-esque overdesigning of the characters.
- Seasonal Rot: Probably his single biggest example is seeing a terrible game in a series that he loves. He was downright savage to both Metroid: Other M and Metroid Prime: Federation Force, and the less said about Silent Hill, the better. And while it wasn't an official Half-Life game, Hunt Down the Freeman earned the position of "Worst Game of the Decade"note and almost drove Yahtzee into a Heroic BSoD because of how it defiled the once-mighty series, with Valve's tacit approval no less (as they allowed it to not only be made and released but even sold on Steam).
- Sequelitis: His biggest issue with the current games industry, which seems hellbent on forcing people to value the same massive franchises over innovative new ideas from indie games. Yahtzee isn't inherently against the idea of sequels nor does he assume them to be automatically inferior (a sizeable percentage of titles in his annual "Best Games" lists are sequels), but he feels a vast majority of them become too comfortable in regurgitating the same formula with less spontaneity and ambition with only a perfunctory level of new ideas to warrant being in a separate product. It's telling that many of the sequels he rates highly (including Silent Hill 2, BioShock Infinite, Resident Evil 4) are so substantially different to their predecessors that they may as well be entirely separate games.
- Stealth-Based Mission: He likes the stealth genre, but a "forced stealth section" in the middle of a non-stealth game is one of his pet peeves.
- Story Branching: As he explains in "Stop Pretending Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Games Are Innovative", he's thoroughly sick of adventure games like Until Dawn or everything David Cage has ever made that are basically just big-budget Choose Your Own Adventure books, but are so self-important and pretentious about presenting themselves as a bold evolution of the medium of video games when they're anything but. He points out that they're not even really branching narratives, as the various branches always have to be kept close to each other because there are only so many assets and locations to go around, so all they're really doing is withholding content for the repeat playthrough, which is even less exciting than the initial one. He's better-inclined towards Algorithmic Story Branching because they're closer to proper role playing since they're informed by your gameplay, but still doesn't think they're all that. His preferred form of player-controlled narrative are the ones where the player gets to influence and control an entirely unscripted procedurally-generated character's story arc, such as his soldiers in X-COM or the orks generated by the Nemesis System in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
- Take Cover!: The proliferation of cover-based shooting in the seventh generation of consoles earned Yahtzee's ire, especially as so much of them didn't have anything else going for them. As he points out in his review of Inversion, cover-based shooting works if it connects the more interesting bits of the game together, such as stealth gameplay for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Bullet Time for Max Payne 3, well-implemented jetpack flight in Dark Void or an amazing story for Spec Ops: the Line. Inversion itself was roundly criticized for having it's central gimmick - gravitiy manipulation - used in service to the cover-based shooting, which is akin to, in his words, "grinding up the model airplane components to help beef up the glue."
- Updated Re-release: Especially when Nintendo do it. This isn't universal, however. He supports rereleases of older games that are more difficult to acquire, such as Ōkami and Killer7, and supports some as preserving important pieces of the medium. Or in the case of games he really likes, such as Resident Evil 4, he's far more understanding of constant porting to new systems.
- Video-Game Lives: Believes the trope to be long obsolete and is baffled when any new game features one.
- Waggle: He heavily considers motion controls to be a dead end pursued by trend-followers with too much disposable income. Since there's no actual physical feedback and your motions in real life don't often correlate to what's happening in the game, motion controls in his view are anathema to the idea of immersion. It's one of his key issues with Nintendo consoles, because how shoehorned-in it seems.
- Wide-Open Sandbox: By the late 2010's and early 20's, Yahtzee's grown especially tired of the format, primarily due to the glut of many open world games being mediocre by way of being both shallow and excessively bloated with lazily-structured, repetitive gameplay. Even when he praised the likes of Ghost of Tsushima and Elden Ring as examples of the genre done well (respectively making them "5th Best of 2020" and "2nd Best of 2022"), he still docked points for them being part of an overdone, exhausting trend that made it difficult to appreciate the love and effort went into them.
- World of Snark: He dislikes this for a multitude of reasons, primarily the fact that Snark-to-Snark Combat is a single form of joke that many creator will coast on in lieu of writing actual comedy with wit. He finds that games (and media in general) that overdo snark result in characters that all have the same "voice", wasted air spent on characters smugly bickering about nothing, and doing nothing to enhance the characters, setting, or overall plot besides making them all insufferable in a way the narratives don't expect them to be.Yahtzee: Want to know how to do a Gears of War witticism? Step 1: Say something relevant but completely obvious to stir the players from the latest trance the combat put them into. Step 2: Continue talking uselessly until I hate you.
- World of Symbolism: As he explains in his Sea of Solitude review, he dislikes games that handle this trope poorly, affecting the appearance of depth while merely shoving unsubtle symbolism in the player's face and not allowing for any alternative interpretation. He brings up Moby-Dick in comparison, pointing out that while the reader can take the book as a metaphor for many things, they can also just accept the adventure story on it's face, which is something these games don't allow for.
