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Yahtzee Croshaw's thing that is a review show, named after Yahtzee Croshaw's thing that is a website.

"But, you know, talking about prostate cancer makes me think about how ephemeral life is, and how transitory the things we take for granted can be. Look at me. Two weeks ago I was making a series called Zero Punctuation for a site called The Escapist, and that's all changed now. We've moved on to Second Wind, where we can be 100% creator-owned and independently funded. There's all kinds of cuntery we can get away with now."
— Yahtzee discusses his move to Second Wind

After 16 years of Zero Punctuation at The Escapist, Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw left the site out of solidarity along with most of the rest of the staff when editor-in-chief Nick Calandra was fired, marking the end of the series. However, Yahtzee soon confirmed that this was not the end of his reviewing career, as he would continue his work on Second Wind, a new gaming channel founded by the former Escapist staff, with a Creator-Driven Successor called Fully Ramblomatic,note  continuing to bring viewers the insightful, snarky, and curse-filled style they have enjoyed for years. Also like Zero Punctuation, it has a companion series called Semi-Ramblomatic, in which Yahtzee discusses game-associated concepts like he did in Extra Punctuation.

The series premiered on November 15th, 2023, with Alan Wake II being the first game reviewed.

You can find the playlist of every Fully Ramblomatic episode on YouTube at this link, and Semi Ramblomatic's playlist is found here.

Games covered on the show (in upload order):

    open/close all folders 

     2023 
     2024 

Fully Ramblomatic provides and discusses examples of the following tropes:

  • Abstract Scale:
    • His review of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has him invent the STDJ scale to rank the quality of Metroidvanias, short for "start to double jump". The double jump is singled out because he sees it as the point where the developers gave up on inventing new ideas.
    • In "The Importance of a Good Monster Introduction", Yahtzee brings up the "Start to Crate" metric coined by Old Man Murray to describe how long it takes for a game to introduce crates, which appear to be omnipresent in every game. Yahtzee uses this as a launch point to discuss the similarly omnipresent aspect of how games introduce the first enemy monster and how it sets the tone of the combat, and in turn setting the precedent for the rest of the gameplay.
  • Accentuate the Negative: While Yahtzee is famous for being an unabashed Caustic Critic, and usually picks the game he reviews based on how much he's able to riff on them, this show surprisingly downplays this aspect, similar to the later years of Zero Punctuation. He's still an acerbic critic who calls out important flaws in games as he sees them for both critical and comedic value, but he's become more open to addressing things he enjoys without attaching a lateral swipe, with his complaints themselves tending to be less comedically nitpicky in nature.
  • Anti-Climax:
    • Discussed in the Semi-Ramblomatic video "The Difficulty Paradox", highlighting a conundrum of certain games (especially those with RPG Elements) having to balance between rewarding players with a sense of progression and presenting ever-increasing challenges in the form of a difficulty curve. Yahtzee posits that while the two do cancel each other out in theory (making a game easier vs. making a game harder), it is possible to reach an equilibrium by way of a game rewarding players with new options and forms of expression vs. new challenges that force them to think their way around new scenarios. Yahtzee finds that many modern AAA games have an issue with both, where challenges neither adequately ramp up and options/"innovations" are really just ways to skip the gameplay loop entirely (citing with Assassin's Creed: Mirage and its game-breakinginvoked ability to automatically stab four enemies at once with impunity as an example), leaving games feeling bland and unrewarding by the end. Yahtzee semi-jokingly blames this kind of direction as being the result of higher-ups who think players get enjoyment from simply wanting to reach the end of the game faster instead of actually playing it.
    • Also discussed in the video "The Importance of an Ending", with Yahtzee lamenting how many modern AAA games tend to lack satisfactory endings, whether because the fundamental design of certain games leave it impossible for them to decisively "end" (such as Wide-Open Sandbox and live-service games), or because they're so big and unnecessarily drawn-out that by the time they do end, you've become too exhausted and unengaged to careinvoked.
    • Yahtzee came down hard on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League for plenty of reasons, one of which being its incredibly abrupt ending where you're given the end goal of killing Brainiac and his multiple clones to ensure that he's Killed Off for Real... except when the game launched, such an end state did not exist. Instead, killing Brainiac the first time, the game stops without resolution and invites you to come back for the next season when new live-service content is added — which, given the terrible and unsatisfying gameplay in general, Yahtzee finds as just the game practically asking for you to drop it.
  • Art Evolution:
    • In contrast to the simple white-hatted avatar from Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee's avatar here ends up getting a more detailed hat, glasses, and a slightly unbuttoned shirt. Characters in general also have circles around their usual dot eyes with a bridge between them, making it look like they're all wearing glasses.
    • Backgrounds from Zero Punctuation tended to be primarily just plain yellow or blue, whereas here, not only do the backgrounds come in red, green, and others, they also feature various background textures with technological motifs like gears, pipes, and circuitry.
  • The Artifact:
    • As Yahtzee has discussed on his previous game review show, he doesn't wear a fedora anymore, even though his Author Avatar does. With the rebrand into Fully Ramblomatic, a perfect opportunity to shift his avatar's appearance came and the fedora was removed... to be replaced with a slightly-more-detailed black fedora.
    • Discussed in his review of Persona 3 Reload — a remake of Persona 3 that inserts several design aspects from Persona 5 — where Yahtz finds that there are some anachronisms going both ways: Persona 3 has a generally more darker and morbid tone that ends up at odds with the flashy spectacle informed by Persona 5's aesthetic, while adopting Persona 5's flashier combat style and streamlined gameplay ends up making the game more manageable and far easier come the endgame.
  • invokedAss Pull: In his review of SANABI he mentions that late-story twists predicate themselves on the narrator's memory being false, a plot thread that he resents, since it means that any established rule of the setting could be overridden with the reason of "that memory was false", suggesting that the whole game is the hallucinating mind of a seagull.
  • Award Category Fraudinvoked: In his Semi-Ramblomatic on "How to Predict The Game Awards", among the more prominent elements of The Game Awards that annoys Yahtzee is how it splits award categories, finding awards being based on genre to be arbitrary at best (trying to define the difference between "Best Action" and "Best Action-Adventure" leaving him stumped), downright regressive at worst (as it goes counter to boundary-pushing games that are strong because they subvert or blend genres). He's also quite miffed by how it treats categories for indie games, relegating them to a ghetto to be viewed as inferior to "the big kids" of triple-A gaming, as well as not respecting the spirit of its own "Best Debut Indie Game", passing it to a game directed by a creator with over a decade of acclaimed indie prestige rather than one by an actual nascent group of up-and-comers. Yahtzee claims that if he were given control of how to fix The Game Awards, he would replace "Best Debut Indie Game" with a "Best Newcomer" award specifically for creators, and revamp genre awards to be instead based on what primary emotional experience they sought to induce in the player, e.g. "Best Game that Made Me Feel Powerful", "Best Game That Made Me Feel Clever", "Best Game That Made Me Scared", "Best Game That Made Me Cry", etc.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: In his review of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Yahtzee notes that the game's combat system allows for some insane acrobatic combos... which Yahtzee knows because he saw it on a TikTok, not because he wanted to or needed to do it, as simple, well-timed button-mashing is just as effective. Yahtzee finds this emblematic of an issue with the game's overall design philosophy: perfectly decent and enjoyable on a base level, but bloated with excess elements it doesn't need just for the sake of seeming "big".
  • Awesomeness Withdrawalinvoked: In his retro review of Beyond Good & Evil, Yahtzee determines the hype surrounding the game's long-awaited sequel to be based from this dynamic. While he overall views the game positively, he notes based on its conspicuous gaps in story and gameplay that it was likely subject to a lot of corner-cutting, and that we were only seeing a mere glimpse of potential for what was already an admirable mix of ambitious gameplay, unique setting, great music, and lovable characters. Yahtzee does feel that the expectations for the long-struggling sequel can only get more astronomical and risky the more nostalgia-blind audiences get and we should probably move on, but sympathizes with the excitement that sprouts up with every vague new announcement due to it being obvious why people simply want more.
  • Author Appeal:
    • Yahtzee's personal enjoyment of Grappling Hook Pistols in video games shows up again in his review of SANABI, where his enjoyment of that mechanic excuses the tropey "hairy dad story" in the game.
    • "Post-punk" is a stylistic descriptor he almost exclusively refers to with fondness, describing games (and media in general) that observe deconstructive approaches to genre and medium and build off of them to launch said mediums into new, often hard to categorize, but inventive directions. He frequently celebrates Suda51 as his favorite of Japanese post-punk game developers, with Killer7 being his opus.
  • Bait-and-Switch: In his Semi-Ramblomatic on "The Rules of a Good Plot Twist", Yahtzee briefly discusses Jump Scares and how they can go wrong by making players overly anxious, which is why he never got into Five Nights at Freddy's. He suspects that it might personally be because of lingering trauma dating back to childhood — not regarding his fear of theme park mascots as previously documented in Zero Punctuation, but an incident regarding "a beloved helium balloon and an unexpected stucco ceiling."
  • Bait-and-Switch Comment: In his review of Alone in the Dark, Yahtz (rhetorically, pretending to be the game in question) asks himself if he likes jigsaw puzzles with a maximum of 9 pieces. Yahtz says he does... because they keep his four-year-old occupied while he does tasks that require actual brainpower, like crosswords and rewiring electronics.
  • Biting-the-Hand Humor: Yahtzee ended his first video saying that he can now do anything he wants, while smoking a severed arm. This was originally supposed to be a bong, but he was told that Youtube would react badly to it and had to change it, and so settled for a Literal Metaphor irony.
  • Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: In Yahtz' review of Pacific Drive, he lists off the reasons why he likes driving: he gets to control a big machine that obeys his every command, he gets to drive fast, the kids are literally strapped down and unable to complain... and he gets to drive into the ocean. Later in the review, he also lists off three of the game's elements that pertain to the core pillars of a dad game: driving around, engine maintenance, grocery shopping... and nuclear disasters.
  • Brick Joke: About halfway through the Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth review, Yahtzee jokes about getting teased more badly than trying to use a glory hole at the retirement home. At the very end of the review, Yahtzee also jokes that the latest game evokes the same feeling as watching an elder family member wander around and get distracted — with the aforementioned glory hole being one of those distractions.
  • Bring My Brown Pants:
    • When Yahtzee discusses jumpscares in "The Rules of a Good Plot Twist", his avatar gets jumpscared by a monster jumping out of his television. He proceeds to pull out a box of adult diapers while saying "good thing I brought these", strongly implying he shat himself out of fright.
    • He considers Amnesia: The Bunker to be his top 4 best game of 2023 because it "actually scared the piss out of my jaded arse." Complete with an image of Yahtzee pissing out of his ass while playing the game.
      Please don't ask what piss was doing in my arse.
  • British Stuffiness: Discussed in "An Explanation of "Post-Punk" Games". Yahtzee, being British, recognizes that the British have a tendency to be quite uptight and authoritarian — which has resulted in a significant British counterculture that despises conventions and norms. It's what produced the significant British Punk music scene, the alternative comedy movement in the 80's, and the British bedroom game programmer boom.
  • Call-Back: During his summary in "How to Predict The Game Awards" on suggestions for how to fix the Game Awards, Yahtzee lists the potential for award categories not based on genre, but of certain emotional experiences, with a game for each, such as Doom (2016) for "Best Game That Made Me Feel Powerful" and The Mortuary Assistant for "Best Game That Made Me Feel Scared". For "Best Game That Made Me Cry", Yahtzee lists Spiritfarer — a game that he confessed back in Zero Punctuation had genuinely brought him to tears — and briefly digresses to exclaim "Oh God, I just want to know you're in a happier place now, Alice the Hedgehog!"
  • Canine Companion: Yahtzee's avatar is joined by an avatar of his dog Toffee, as a replacement for the imps.
  • Captain Obvious Reveal: invokedDiscussed in "The Rules of a Good Plot Twist" — while one of Yahtzee's rules is that a plot twist shouldn't be too obvious, he also argues that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with a twist being "obvious" if the audience puts the legwork in to decipher the narrative puzzle before the game itself does. He chastises game developers (most prominently David Cage) who attempt to screw the audience out of an honest narrative by giving them an impossible-to-predict twist just for the sake of feeling like they're "outsmarting" them, and encourages writers to allow the audience to guess as speculation is half of the fun, and that they're entitled to their moment of glory when they realize they're right.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: This is Yahtzee, after all, once again freed from the constraints of YouTube's demonetisation tyranny that forced Zero Punctuation to begin censoring all the swearing near the end of its run.
  • Colon Cancer: Just like in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee dry-heaves whenever reading the title of a game with an unnecessary colon, especially for the first entry of a yet-to-be-established series like Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The color of the background changes from the default red depending on which aspect of the game Yahtzee is currently discussing, with beige for plot/setting, blue for gameplay, etc.
  • Color Motif: The subject of "The Language of Color in Games", with Yahtzee observing how gaming culture formed an unspoken, yet understood agreement of what certain colors mean for certain gameplay elements, ranging from red meaning "health", blue meaning "magic" or "shields", brown meaning "realism", to magenta meaning "mainstream interpretation of 'punk' aesthetics".
  • Continuity Lockoutinvoked: Discussed in his Final Fantasy VII Rebirth review as one of the reasons he isn't keen on it or its predecessor, Final Fantasy VII Remake. As a non-fan of the original, Yahtzee describes the feeling of playing these remakes like "being a new boyfriend in a well-established friend group," where the games seemed to intrinsically assume he will enjoy being around "familiar" elements rather than finding them alienating and annoying, finding Yuffie (a character who the game had hyped up with many false intros before officially joining the party) to be just another Manic Pixie Dream Girl alongside the other girls in the party.
  • invokedDelusion Conclusion: Yahtz sarcastically suggests that all of SANABI is a false memory, occurring in the Dying Dream of a seagull.
  • Double Entendre: Inverted in the Dragon's Dogma review. Yahtzee mentions at one point that the "climb on monsters" mechanic led to him smothering his face into a minotaur's pubic hair; from that point onwards, the mildly sexual phrase "pubic hair" becomes shorthand for the more innocent "fighting monsters".
  • Dump Months: Yahtzee addresses mid-December as being this for video games, "too late to receive any game awards or to go on anyone's Christmas lists," noting that if a big game studio releases a title during that window of time (examples including The Callisto Protocol and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora), chances are that they have little to no faith in it.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: Discussed in his review of Persona 3 Reload — having gotten hooked onto the series from Persona 5, Yahtzee notices a lot of odd issues with tone and underdeveloped identity from (the remake of) its predecessor, though he ultimately enjoys the Persona gameplay enough to excuse most of its flaws. In fact, Yahtzee admits that part of him likes that it's a bit all-over-the-place, and feels that Persona 3 being remade in the way it was is in some ways a disservice as it buries those idiosyncrasies to history.
    Yahtzee: There's a unique value to watching the process by which a concept finds its groove. It's like the beauty of seeing a tree grow from a seed, or a blooming flower of girlhood expand to fill out her training bra, or a vibrant purple bruise slowly spreading out from your eye socket after the blooming flower of girlhood's dad shows up.
  • Escape Sequence: One critique Yahtz had of Pizza Tower was the presence of this trope. Each level has a Timed Mission in which the player has to race to the start of the level while also having to locate hidden items, which Yahtzee found too stressful. As such, while he enjoyed the game, the experience ended up being too much to play more than a few levels at a time.
  • Everybody Hates Mathematics: Joked about in the Semi-Ramblomatic of "Why Truly Original Games Are So Rare": while brainstorming a hypothetically "original" concept to illustrate the pitfalls that can come from the process, he proposes a melee combat system where rather than basing it on fast reflexes and strategic planning, it's based around typing coherent various themed words... which would be a nightmare to prototype as it involves programming every word in the English language and flagging them for context. Yahtzee attempts a compromise by instead focusing on less cumbersome math equations... which would in turn be less flexible in ability to allow players to express their creativity, in addition to the fact that "Nobody thinks maths is fun. Nobody you'd want to be trapped in conversation with at a party, anyway."
  • Exact Words: As Yahtzee admits midway through his "Best, Worst, and Blandest of 2023" video, he's talking about all the games he reviewed in 2023, "regardless of what label they were reviewed under".
  • Excuse Plot: Discussed and almost namedropped in the review of Pacific Drive. Yahtzee finds the story of the game to be somewhat underbaked, with the game's most substantial plot element being the personalities and interplay of the Mission Control who are giving you assignments, with Yahtzee still describing them "as about as interesting and well-characterized as a bodiless voice with the physical presence of a fart can be." However, Yahtzee is ultimately okay with it as they're decent enough at doing their job of informing the gameplay, which is the real meat of the game's appealinvoked.
    Yahtzee: ...but you know what? I'll take it. It'll do, because all I want from the story is an excuse. It could just tell me that driving my car keeps the baby owls nesting in the carburetor warm, and that'd do, because driving the car is fun!
  • Extreme Doormat:
    • In a throwaway joke from "The Moral Dilemmas that Weren't", Yahtzee admits that — when presented with moral dilemmas — he'll just do whatever would please the person in his immediate vicinity because he doesn't want confrontation. This is accompanied with a graphic of Yahtz considering a baby sacrifice because the person in front of him wants it.
    • Part of the reason why he ended up playing the card-game minigame from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth so long, despite hating it, is because he didn't want to get puppy-dog-eyes-ed at by the announcer NPC running the thing.
  • Fanon Discontinuityinvoked: In his review of South Park: Snow Day!, Yahtzee would like to insist that South Park only received its first video game with The Stick of Truth in 2014, and that if anyone tries to argue that there are earlier games, they're lying and must be chased back into their homes with guns and attack dogs.
    Yahtzee: So even sight unseen, I had my misgivings about a full 3D real-time combat-based South Park game; remember the terrible N64 ga— I mean, don't remember it, 'cos it didn't exist.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode: "Yahtzee Showcased Starstruck Vagabond at GDC 2024" follows Yahtzee not only covering a live event and in front of the camera, but also as a presenter, with the video detailing the experience of showcasing his own upcoming video game, Starstruck Vagabond.
  • Hanlon's Razor: Yahtzee's review of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is nothing short of a thorough knifing over all of its awful game design decisions, and his most charitable explanation for why the game turned out the way it did was that Rocksteady was using "weaponized incompetence" — willfully making a terrible live-service game to prove to Warner Bros. that such games are a waste of time so they can return to making the world-class, groundbreaking single-player games they were famous for. Unfortunately, Yahtzee still notes the key pitfall that Suicide Squad was actively defiling such work, with its plot being based around overriding the Batman: Arkham Series in a disrespectful and unsatisfactory way, meaning it's instead killed all interest in the franchise.
  • Happy Ending Override:
  • Hidden Depths: During his mini-review of Jusant in "The Games of 2023 I Didn't Review", Yahtzee revealed a fun personal fact previously unmentioned in his long career: he's an avid indoor rock climber ("Well, I was — it's hard to find time away from the kids while I'm unwilling to duct tape them to my spine."), which he brings up to highlight his insight towards the unique physicality of the sport that Jusant does an admirable job of replicating.
  • Hype Backlashinvoked: Played for Laughs during "The Best, Worst and Blandest of 2023", where he didn't include Baldur's Gate III in the "Best" section — despite having enjoyed it and finding it a welcome bastion of artfully-designed single-player design amidst a year of increasingly-repugnant live-service games — solely on the grounds that it already won Game of the Year at The Game Awards and doesn't want it to get too smug.
  • Infodump: Discussed in his review of The Talos Principle 2 as one of its few prominent flaws, in that while it's a beautiful, well-designed, and genuinely fascinating game, it (as well as its predecessor) goes about its philosophical topics in a very dry, robotic way that can come off as unnecessarily excessive. Yahtzee believes that the reason the game went under most peoples' radar was that "it's not the least bit sexy," comparing it to how Disco Elysium was also very smart and funny and "full of sexy drama," and that there's very much enough room for good science fiction to tackle big questions and "have a few exciting laser gun fights as well."
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks!invoked:
  • Joke and Receive: Yahtzee did this to himself at one point: in "The Games of 2023 I Didn't Review", he mocks The Game Awards for basing its award categories on genre, which he feels is a flawed practice for a variety of reasons, remarking that they should instead categorize awards based on what feelings they bring out in you, such as "Best Game That Made Us Excited", "Best Game That Made Us Scared", and "Best Game That Made Us Haunted By Our Own Capacity for Violence in a Zero-Consequence Environment". During his later Semi-Ramblomatic on "How to Predict The Game Awards", Yahtzee admitted that he was just joking at the time, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense, and that if he did have the ability to fix The Game Awards, he would implement this change.
  • Karma Meter: Discussed in the Semi-Ramblomatic "The Moral Dilemmas that weren't", where he notes that most implementations of a Karma Meter fail, either because the evil option is downright nonsensical, just for the sake of being evil, very obviously go against the moral the game preaches (as in Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, where the entire game insists on the importance of exorcising ghosts, even if they are your loved ones, but still gives the player the choice of bringing Antea back to life in a ritual that screams "this is the wrong choice"), or the so-touted "downsides" for making the harder choice really aren't that impactful (such as making combat in Vampyr (2018) harder, but in a way that keeps it fun and engaging rather than making it tedious or annoying, further encouraging players to stick to the good path).
  • Lame Pun Reaction: In the Graven episode, Yahtzee says that the game's title is what a car crash victim would say to describe the vehicle that hit him.note  His avatar is then shown wincing at his laptop's screen, as he apologizes for how bad the pun is.
  • Lampshaded the Obscure Reference:
    • Yahtz represents the protagonist of a reviewed game as having the head of some other fictional character. For the Graven review, the protagonist is introduced alongside the phrase "Christ no one's gonna get *this* reference", as Treguard from Knightmare fills in for Graven's protagonist.
    • In the Skull & Bones review, Yahtzee makes note of characters commenting on "the look on [your player character's] eyes", then comments "Who are we, The Demon Headmaster?! Yes, I do get off on making references most people won't get."
  • Limited Animation: Discussed during the South Park: Snow Day! review, mentioning how the game attempts to recreate the style of South Park, which heavily features this (albeit less so than The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole, where Snow Day! inexplicably opted to shift to 3D). Yahtzee notes that such stylism ends up becoming a liability in a real-time combat system as it simply becomes harder to read, using his own animation style to illustrate the problem.
    Yahtzee: My visual style works well enough to deliver gags, and is easy to knock out during my brief windows of consciousness, but I wouldn't use it for a combat engine, 'cos there's no visual difference between a character winding up a punch and saluting a Nazi.
  • Makes As Much Sense In Context: The opening to the Dragon's Dogma 2 episode: "sometimes I lick the underbellies of sugar gliders for an illicit sexual thrill." Yahtzee then immediately admits that he was only saying that for shock value.
  • Malicious Misnaming: As part of his vendetta against sequels that don't involve a number in their title, Yahtzee refers to Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth with random subtitles like Final Fantasy VII Porridge or Final Fantasy VII Part Knickerbocker.
  • Manic Pixie Dream Girl: A trope brought up frequently in his review of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, noting that part of the reason he isn't exactly impressed by its story (or of the original Final Fantasy VII) is that all three female party members seem to be this single archetype, and are either interchangeable or cringe-inducing in their attempts to be endearing.
    Yahtzee: Blimey, how much can one man be Manic Pixie Dream Girl'd without going into diabetic shock?
  • Mid-Battle Tea Break: In the Graven episode, Yahtzee describes how the game suffers from a weird Inventory Management Puzzle where weapons take multiple slots on the hotbar, but you still can carry extra weapons in your inventory, so if you need to switch it can be incredibly awkward. This is visually represented by the protagonist telling a zombie and a Scrag that it's "time out lads" mid-fight, after his crossbow runs dry. The zombie and Scrag oblige, sipping at drinks as they wait for the protagonist to finish fumbling around with his weapons.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • Fully Ramblomatic is the title of Yahtzee's blog and was the title of the pre-Escapist reviews that later became Zero Punctuation.
    • At the end of the Alone in the Dark (2024) review, Yahtzee proclaims he can't relate to the protagonist, "and not just because I've never worn a trilby [...]". Toffee then brings over the white hat Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation avatar was wearing, to which Yahtzee replies that it's a fedora.
  • No Problem with Licensed Gamesinvoked: Discussed in his review of RoboCop: Rogue City: Yahtzee notes that its developer, Teyon, have started to find their niche of adapting classic 80's action properties for modern generations, something that Yahtzee is surprisingly okay with as the games themselves are perfectly competent and fun and have an obvious nostalgic appeal to them. He does highlight, however, that they do receive a somewhat disproportionate amount of praise simply for not being what people normally expect of "licensed games" and reiterates that RoboCop does still have problems — it's faithful in a way that allows nostalgia do the heavy lifting, while the gameplay itself is "exactly as good as it needs to be and no better".
  • Nonconformist Dyed Hair: Discussed during "The Language of Color in Games", where Yahtzee makes note of how magenta is the go-to primary color for highly corporate-driven and sanitized mainstream fare when it's trying to appear free-spirited, punky, and bohemian, almost always featuring at least one character with magenta hair as a cheap ploy to appear "rebellious". Yahtzee also makes note of how a weird number of indie games also feature player characters with cyan hair, which might be a response to the overuse of magenta.
    Yahtzee: So now all we need is a trend for yellow and we've got everything we need to refill a color printer.
  • Non-Indicative Name: Joked about in his RoboCop: Rogue City review, highlighting that gaming culture has a pretty bad track record with naming certain genres of video games, specifically highlighting how "Adventure Game" has been used to describe "games where you rub random inventory items on everything like a blind raccoon in a recycling facility."
  • "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
    • In the RoboCop: Rogue City review, Yahtzee describes a "suffocatingly pointless side-quest where RoboCop goes around, getting everyone to sign a 'Get Well Soon' card, and that's not the facetious exaggerated example it sounds like."
    • In his Jusant mini-review, he finds that the game tapers off when it stops being about slowly exploring through the remnants of a lost civilization and just goes "Oh fuck it, I'm bored, space whales out of nowhere!" Yahtzee pauses to reiterate that the game indeed features literal space whales.
  • Notice This: Discussed throughout the review of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, with Yahtzee criticizing the game for botching this. On one hand, Yahtzee is already annoyed by the game's unfocused "Jiminy Cockthroat" approach to Wide-Open Sandbox design in plastering notifiers over everything, undermining the exploration aspect since the game just tells you were to go. On the other hand, he found that with the game's option to turn those notifiers off (replacing the objective markers with vague location clues that require more problem-solving), the game became unfairly difficult as the objectives become easily obscured by the cluttered environment. Yahtzee finds this especially damning since the whole appeal of the game lies in exploring beautiful and lush alien landscapes, but because this aspect was so mishandled, it's either ignorable or actively impedes the player.
  • Obscure Popularityinvoked: Discussed in the review of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, with Yahtzee questioning how Avatar is apparently a massively successful global juggernaut despite nobody ever expressing much interest in it. He jokingly speculates that there's either "an unknown subsection of humanity living among us, presumably dwelling underground and subsisting on rats and stray dogs, who emerge from the sewer drains at night to watch Avatar movies and send votes into America's Next Top Model", or that James Cameron is buying up empty theatre seats "when he's not buggering off to the bottom of the ocean to scrape bits of dead billionaire off the Titanic."
  • Observation on Originality: Discussed in "Why Truly Original Games Are So Rare", where Yahtzee admits that even as a critic who can be snobby about games not being able to come up with new gameplay ideas, actually doing that is really freaking hard, and ironically by trying to pursue an original idea, the closer you end up replicating something that already exists. Yahtzee posits that the most original ideas only really come from a spontaneous spark of taking a game mechanic and reframing it through a unique perspective rather than strictly iterating or building upon it, citing Balatro (a Roguelike Deckbuilding Game based on poker) as one of these high concepts that's so effective and obvious in retrospect that it leaves everyone wondering how no one came up with it earlier. Yahtzee further makes a point that this sort of innovation almost never happens in big-budget triple-A development because the risks are so high that very few suits are willing to bank on pursuing such novel ideas without overthinking it, and it instead comes from indie game development, full of "mad people having mad ideas" who can go about uninhibited.
  • Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: Yahtzee really hates this trope, alongside adjacent tropes like reusing the exact same title between sequels and pointless colons and subtitles on games purporting to be the first installment of a yet-to-be-developed series. He was very quick to praise The Talos Principle 2 right off the bat for having a simple numeric sequel title, which he found refreshingly "old-school".
  • Oh, Crap!: During his review of Dragon's Dogma II, Yahtzee establishes early on that the game one has one save slot, and tells his audience that this will be relevant later. A bit into the review, he then describes the moment he finally gave up on the game: after a particularly harsh difficulty spike against a boss and realizing that every time he loaded a save to retry it, a chunk of his maximum health was being sliced off, he decided to accept the "last inn" save and tank the walk back. However, to his unpleasant surprise, he didn't actually spawn at his last inn, but somewhere four or five hours ago, and since the game only supported one save slot...
    Yahtzee: Oh no. Oh no no no no no no, don't you fucking autosave, you single save-slotted slattern— (game throws out his progress) — FUCK!
  • Once Original, Now Commoninvoked: Discussed in the review of Alone in the Dark (2024). Yahtzee expresses mild confusion over how Alone in the Dark keeps popping up with misguided remakes/reboots every few generations despite none of the games being better than "halfway decent", noting that the first game, while a pioneer to 3D Survival Horror, has aged pretty embarrassingly. Yahtzee does give the 2024 title some credit where after several failed attempts to reinvent the franchise — 2001's The New Nightmare being a shameless ripoff of Resident Evil, 2008's remake being "creatively-spirited but unwittingly camp", and 2015's Illumination just being flat-out terrible — it wisely decides to revisit the roots by evoking the 1920's Lovecraftian horror setting of the first, most well-regarded title, before going in its own new directions (even if it is still extremely derivative of Resident Evil 4).
  • Oscar Bait: Discussed in the Semi-Ramblomatic on "How to Predict The Game Awards", with Yahtzee identifying the hallmarks for what easily wins at TGA (effectively becoming what the Oscars are for video games in terms of prestige and publicity), having used them to correctly predict about 90% of all the awards for its 2023 show:
    • In terms of "Game of the Year" in specific, actual quality of the games themselves is irrelevant (though it does help) — it's more about pushing a narrative for the gaming industry as a whole, with Baldur's Gate III being an obvious shoo-in not just because it's a good game, but because most of the competition in the category were either remakes or sequels, which can be seen as regressive rather than forward-pushing. This left Alan Wake II the only viable competitor, but Yahtzee didn't see it winning either because, by his observations, the triple-A games industry gets cold feet at the idea of video games actually being an artistically provocative medium rather than a place for reliable committee designinvoked, with a game as experimental, postmodern, and auteurist as Alan Wake II only being enough to claim a Consolation Award in the form of "Best Game Direction".
    • Regarding "Best Indie Game", what the TGA eyes more than quality is aspiration, specifically when it comes to its reverence for "the establishment". This is primarily due to the preference to see indie games as plucky underdogs or "sidekicks" to triple-A gaming rather than a respectable source of creative ingenuity and innovation in the medium, which usually means the award will usually be given to something blatantly derivative on virtue of it trying to "be like the big kids."invoked On that same token, TGA resists any form of subversive and rebellious elements, resulting in the highly quirky, but critical indie darling Pizza Tower getting snubbed from "Best Debut Indie Game" in favor of the traditionally "artsy" indie fare of Cocoon (2023) (despite the latter being directed by an established indie veteran).
    • He sees audio and music awards as a Consolation Awardsinvoked for games that are popular enough to mention and pay respect to, but not good enough to qualify for other, bigger awards, citing the likes of Final Fantasy XVI as an easy winner for "Best Score and Music" by sole virtue of being a legacy entry from a big franchise in spite of otherwise being too lackluster for anything else (Yahtzee did note that Hi-Fi RUSH was an exception due to being so centrally and effectively built around its audio design that it backed TGA into a corner, realistically leaving it the only possible victor of "Best Audio Design").
    • While Yahtzee doesn't have guaranteed guidelines for niche genre awards (primarily due to finding such separations of genres for awarding arbitrary at the best of times), he does find that first party Nintendo titles are most likely to win by virtue of the company being so well-regarded and integral to the "establishment" of gaming that TGA seeks to pander to.
  • Our Product Sucks: Lightly discussed during the review of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, where Yahtzee makes a point that the game defines itself with the narrative motif of "we suck": the titular squad of baddies suck, the person they work for sucks, the city of Metropolis sucks after it was turned into a warzone by the Justice League, who now suck because they're being brainwashed by "the suckiest dude of them all", Brainiac, etc. Yahtzee understands the gag the game is trying to pull off, and he doesn't bag on it for "not giving a shit" about itself in an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek way — rather, he's annoyed that the game actually doesn't give a shit, with gameplay so perfunctory and repetitive that there's no sense of escalation or satisfaction, making its self-debasement ultimately feeling disrespectful and tone-deaf.
    Game: When you feel confident, you go to the next story mission to fight the next Justice League member, not that you should feel confident, 'cos you suck so much, you bunch of huge sucky suck suckaroo—
    Yahtzee: Yes, yes, sorry to interrupt, but I genuinely can't tell: are you continuing the broadly insincere "we suck" motif of the story, or are you telling me I'm still too underleveled for the next story mission?
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: From the Dragon's Dogma 2 review, Yahtzee portrays the impostor of the Arisen king as a giant potato with his hat and a smiley face scribbled onto it. It was apparently enough to fool at least one royal court assistant.
  • invokedPet-Peeve Trope:
    • Yahtzee highlights one particular grievance of his with modern triple-A games: bad titles. Titles that are named identically to another game, unnecessary subtitles for new IPs, generic titles, and generic titles with a made-up proper noun in them are all highlighted as sounding uncreative or generic.
    • "Jiminy Cockthroats"ie. are a recurring annoyance of Yahtzee's from Zero Punctuation. When he describes a segment of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth that has an open world, towers, crafting, and ledge climbing, he tells the viewer to imagine his face deteriorating as if via meth usage while he lists each element.
  • Please Subscribe to Our Channel:
    • The end of the Alan Wake II review debuting the series sees Yahtzee — in an uncharacteristically sincere outro — asking viewers to subscribe to the Second Wind Patreon page.
    • Requested again at the end of "The Best, Worst and Blandest of 2023", the first video of 2024 and the official marking of Second Wind's first year.
      Yahtzee: Yeah, I know donation drives are a bore, but all the good wishes in the world won't get us past the budget section of your mum's blowjob catalogue.
  • Plot Twist: Discussed in the Semi-Ramblomatic of "The Rules of a Good Plot Twist", with the three cardinal rules Yahtzee lays out being: it can't be seen cominginvoked (otherwise there's no suspense or surprise), it can't come out of nowhere (because it feels cheap and denies a sense of satisfactory resolution), and it can't be based on the work outright lying to the audience (otherwise it makes the story less interesting on repeat observations rather than enhances it). Yahtzee describes a the concept of "the really good plot twist" existing on the same trifecta as "the really good joke" and "the really good Jump Scare", all being powerful shocks of emotion for the audience if handled well, but can really die if handled poorly.
  • Post-Somethingism:
    • One Semi-Ramblomatic episode discusses how he uses the term "Post-Punk" in relation to games. To Yahtz, something that is "punk" would be something produced to defy major artforms or trends, while something that is "post-punk" is an evolved form of punk that explores the subversion of the trend rather than merely existing to be an opposite. He considers punk music to be a rejection of classical music theory, while post-punk music continues to be that while being more than "making a bunch of noise in your dad's garage". For a video-game example, he cites the joke Game Mod Crack-Life as a punk artform,note  while something like Undertale is post-punk.note 
    • He also applies this concept to what he calls "dad games" (games where you play as a father or engage in jobs/hobbies associated with older men) and "post-dad games" (where the same concepts are put in weirder and more fantastic contexts).
  • Precision F-Strike: Discussed regarding American Arcadia, a game which he was unsure if he enjoyed it or not up until the end, which he found to be "the most satisfying ending of any game I've played in a while"invoked, which he attributes to the fact it has an extremely well-executed example.
    Yahtzee: Obviously, I won't spoil, but you know how films with PG ratings, you're only allowed to say "fuck" precisely once? If that's also the case with video games, and if there were some kind of annual prize for "Best Strategic Use of Your One Permitted 'Fuck'", then American Auntie Nora would be my hot pick.
  • Prolonged Prologueinvoked: Discussed regarding Final Fantasy VII Rebirth as something that frustrated Yahtzee alongside its predecessor, where both are meant to be remakes of Final Fantasy VII, yet they take their sweet time actually getting the plot going. Yahtzee admits that this is more applicable to Remake (which to him only progress through "a hearty .5% of the original game's plot"), but Rebirth suffers a different problem where it's covering the second third of the game, where not much actually happens and largely consists of meandering about.
    Yahtzee: There's a scene early on where "Manic Pixie Dream Girl B" [...] gleefully does a little skip and goes, "That's the first step on our new journey!", and I very clearly remember yelling at the screen, "Journey to where?! To do what?!"
  • Raging Stiffie: Yahtz says The Talos Principle gives him a "brain boner". Cue image of Yahtzee's avatar with a boner... coming out from his head, tenting the shape of his hat.
  • Recycled Titleinvoked: Just like in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee really hates these, finding it unnecessarily confusing, even for remakes. While he doesn't dwell on it for his review of Alone in the Dark (2024), he briefly makes it clear how annoyed he is for it being the third entry in the series to use the exact same title.
    Yahtzee: There's also contextual throwable items which are occasionally Molotovs and ostensibly light enemies on fire, although it looks more like they've just put on delightful little orange ballet tutus and are really efficient for making you nostalgic for the really good fire physics in the identically-titled game from fifteen fucking years ago.
  • The Reveal: Although many viewers were able to figure it out on their own beforehand, The Best, Worst and Blandest of 2023 allows Yahtzee to finally admit that the one game he couldn't previously mention by name due to the embargo date being moved was Hellboy Web of Wyrd.
  • Ruder and Cruder: A somewhat roundabout case: Yahtzee has always been a very blue-humored writer, but in the final years of Zero Punctuation, concerns over demonetization and excessive swearing forced him to tone down his profanity. With Fully Ramblomatic and the shift towards other forms of income as per Second Wind's creator-owned model (primarily operating through audience support and outside sponsorships), demonetization by YouTube has become much less of a concern, with Yahtzee happily announcing at the series' debut that he's able to return to using the swear words he wants. Somewhat humorously, this means the censoring was in effect for only about five videos of Zero Punctuation before Yahtzee came back with a vengeance.
  • Running Gag:
    • He compares the "long chillout periods broken up by sudden apocalyptic violence" in Pacific Drive to the intensity of having sex with every animal in a zoo. From that point onwards, having sex with zoo animals becomes a reoccurring joke within the review.
    • Early in the Dragon's Dogma 2 video, Yahtzee mentions that the game has a "climb all over giant monsters" mechanic, which he communicates with the visual of him smothering himself into the pubic hair of a minotaur. An association with pubic hair and/or spitting out loose hairs of such is used as a shorthand for fighting monsters for the rest of the review.
  • Sadistic Choice: Discussed as one of the unique, but failed core elements of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden: the protagonists are an established couple by the start of the game, but one of them ends up killed and becoming a ghost, with the main narrative through-line being the decision of whether she must be exorcised and sent to heaven as per their responsibility as Banishers, or if we should try to bring her back to life with a forbidden ritual that entails sacrificial murder. Yahtzee finds that this falls flat due to it being incredibly obvious which is the narratively "correct" option (aside from one path necessitating murdering several innocents, the prologue hammers home that ghosts are unnatural and must be dealt with), and that presumably the stakes were meant to be covered by the audience being investing in the characters — thus wanting to see them survive — but in this case, they're not very interesting nor likeableinvoked. In the follow-up Semi-Ramblomatic, "The Moral Dilemmas that Weren't", Yahtzee comments that the decision might have been harder if the still-living protagonist was not just emotionally, but physically dependent on Antea — that instead of Red, a hardened Brave Scot who could almost certainly get by on his own against the murder ghosts and for the rest of his life, you replace him with a vulnerable six-year-old girl who will almost certainly die without her (posthumous) guardian, upping the stakes of the decision.
  • Self-Deprecation: At the end of the Alan Wake II review, Yahtzee acknowledges that the end-credits rock song is "overly loud", just like it was on Zero Punctuation.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Sidetracked by the Gold Saucerinvoked:
    • During his review of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Yahtzee discusses that the main meat of Like A Dragon's fun factor lies less in its dramatic stories and more in its quirky sidequests and minigames, and that he would bee-line straight to them at the earliest available opportunity. However, he ended up finding Infinite Wealth throwing him for a loop as the "optional optional sidequests" were largely same-y and boring "help random person in way that involves beating people up" stories, whereas the actually fun sidequests were the "non-optional optional ones", including its weirdly compelling Pokémon and Animal Crossing parodies.
    • Also brought up in his review of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which is stuffed to the brim with mini-games (naturally; it is a partial remake of the Trope Namer, after all). Yahtzee notes that he isn't particularly interested in the mini-games, which made him realize more to his annoyance that the game seemed to be constantly pressuring him to play them rather than letting himself get "sidetracked".
      Yahtzee: [...]inevitably, they'll explain the rules, and inevitably, I'll listen with my mouth hanging open and the Inspector Gadget theme tune running through my head, and then after the tutorial, never play it or think about it again. But then there's a whole chapter devoted to a tournament of this fucking game that I had to opt out of, and when I heard the incredulous voice of the tournament manager asking if I was really quitting, my stubborn pride forced me to back down and learn this stupid card game I didn't find fun just so an NPC wouldn't make a disappointed face.
  • Slumming It: Yahtzee directly describes Ubisoft's development philosophies in making Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown as "a AAA publisher slumming it in AA land." While Yahtzee is happy that Ubisoft is more open to splitting their resources between several smaller-scale, but more focused projects instead of "one billion-dollar Assassin's Creed game every six years that nobody fucking wants," he finds that Ubisoft still can't help it with some of their AAA desires to bloat their games with far more content than necessary, dragging down a relatively lower-scope Metroidvania — which is functionally solid on its owninvoked — with elements that just make everything more tiring and excessive. Yahtzee also remarks regarding one of its better twists to the formula — the ability to snapshot locations and post them to your world map for future reference — that it was such a good idea that his first reaction was to guess which obscure indie Metroidvania Ubisoft stole it from.
  • Take That!:
    • Throughout the Alan Wake II review (the debut for this show), Yahtzee makes several digs at The Escapist and the events that resulted in the retool of Zero Punctuation into FR: as Yahtzee quips about the game world having a sense of reality "as reliable and permanent as a career in corporate tech journalism", along with a hand appearing from the sky to proclaim "we expect you to meet certain targets" (referencing how Nick Calandra, the then-editor-in-chief of The Escapist, was fired for, in his own words, "'not achieving goals' that were never properly set out for us").
    • Another jab at the Escapist from the Semi-Ramblomatic video "The Importance of an Ending": while going into detail of why he enjoyed the ending to American Arcadia, Yahtzee notes that "there's something about a bespectacled dude breaking free of an emotionless corporate machine that particularly resonates with me personally... in the last month or so."
    • Yahtzee introduces his "Best, Worst, and Blandest of 2023" as comparable to The Game Awards, except for two details: actually prioritizing awarding things instead of "sucking off corporate industry so hard that its legs recede into its stomach cavity," and having award categories that make sense.
      Yahtzee: I mean, come on, "Best Action-Adventure"? Might as well have an award for "Best Game With A Title Screen".
    • The opening to the episode on Graven is Yahtz jabbing at white people who complain about minorities having holidays that recognize them, sarcastically remarking that, as a northern European white guy, he doesn't get his own holiday that celebrates the moment when he was liberated from people like him.
      "[...] but I can always take solace in the fact that the entire world literally exists for my benefit. And if I'm bored I can go sail to some exotic land and take all their spice, and proceed to not use it because it smells weird."
  • Tempting Fate: In the Dragon's Dogma 2 review, Yahtz mentions that the game had only one save slot. After fumbling around with his game data folder on his system, he found a way to bypass the restriction in a way that he found sufficient, narrating that he was sure that this would no longer be an issue... before turning to the camera and calling this "Foreshadowing". Whilst a save file bucket hangs over his head, hung up with string alongside a sword of Damocles. The single save slot in fact becomes an issue later during the review, when Yahtzee learns that the game managed to undo an afternoon's worth of game progress by autosaving over his singular save slot, prompting him to Rage Quit the game.
  • invokedThey Copied It, So It Sucks!: In the RoboCop: Rogue City review, he briefly talks about the movement shooter genre that Doom (2016) reawakened. Doom (2016) was a title he enjoyed when it was a standalone classic-style shooter in a slower-paced triple-A sphere, but now that there's a whole Genre Relaunch of classic-style shooters in the wake of Doom, Yahtzee's opinion has changed to be "absolutely bloody sick of the fucking things". Case in point, Robocop: Rogue City was deemed to have passable gameplay, despite Yahtz also comparing it to Gears of War, a game he once considered infamous for slowing the pace down too much, back during Zero Punctuation when all the other triple-A games were doing likewise.
  • invokedUnderused Game Mechanic:
    • One of his criticisms of American Arcadia is that it doesn't mesh together the Dual-World Gameplay of Trevor and Angela's gameplay very well. He cites an early game challenge in which Angela has to answer questions to a security officer while simultaneously keeping tabs on Trevor (who you need to sneak past guards, and can only see when Angela's looking at the right computer monitor), and wishes the game had more of those types of moments.
    • In his review of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Yahtzee noted that one of its better innovations to the Metroidvania formula was the ability to take screenshots and paste them to the map so you can remember what you need to come back to later. He does, however, find it odd that you're only allowed a limited amount of snapshots at a time and have to find collectibles to gain more when it should just be a general quality-of-life feature, comparing it to forcing the player into level grinding just to unlock a volume slider.
    • In "The Moral Dilemmas that Weren't", Yahtzee remarks that Vampyr (2018) came at the cusp of being brilliant with its central moral conflict: you play as a doctor who has an obligation to care for his patients, but is also a vampire who side-gigs as a monster hunter and must sustain himself with the blood of the living, with the game pressuring you into choosing to sacrifice one or more of your named, well-rounded, often likeable patients. Yahtzee argues that this would have been a great test of the player's moral character... had the game fully committed to the concept. Instead, the game makes it so you don't actually have to kill anyone, and thus the whole basis for a moral dilemma is completely moot, and while going on a Pacifist Run makes the game more challenging, this isn't an ideal tradeoff as being challenging can often be more fun (and given that this is the way to reach the Golden Ending, this reads as the game actively rewarding players for not engaging with the moral choices to begin with).
    • Yahtzee declared this to be the big issue with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and why despite overall enjoying it moreinvoked than its immediate predecessor and even the original Final Fantasy VII, he didn't really like it all that much. The cardinal flaw Yahtzee finds is just how many concepts it jumps between with little room to breathe, feeling that even the main combat (which he generally enjoyed more than in Remake) is ultimately just a fall-back option for when it can't think of another minigame, of which there are dozens, describing the game as "a mile wide and an inch thick."
  • Unreliable Expositor: Yahtzee described SANABI as having mildly frustrated him, as while it had some nice story twists, he found himself annoyed by how said twists were predicated on the main character's memory being false, with the game outright lying to the audience about what they showed earlier rather than "a James Sunderland Unreliable Narrator" way where the differences are in the character's own personally-driven misinterpretations. In his Semi-Ramblomatic video "The Rules of a Good Plot Twist", he refers to SANABI as a case for one of his main rules on how to make a Plot Twist interesting rather than frustrating: it shouldn't lie to the audience.
  • Video Game Remake: A concept briefly discussed during his review of Persona 3 Reload, admitting that intellectually-speaking, he's against the idea of remaking games just for the sake of making them up-to-date with recent instalments, feeling that it erases history and its earlier quirks formed by burgeoning development for the sake of homogeneity.
  • Video Game Tutorial:
    • Discussed on the Semi-Ramblomatic video "The Lost Art of the Tutorial Level", discussing the evolution of how video games teach players their mechanics. While Yahtzee does concede that the modern trends of integrated tutorials taking place during gameplay is a much more efficient and useful method, he can't help but express nostalgia for the dedicated tutorial levels of late 90's shooters like Half-Life, Deus Ex, and Thief: The Dark Project, feeling like their ability to provide a pressure-free environment to learn the gameplay while also setting up early worldbuilding before the "good stuff" of the main game was rather undervalued.
    • Part of "The Importance of a Good Monster Introduction" discusses how video games introduce the first enemy to the player, and thus their combat system, and how it can be done well or poorly in terms of immersing players and instructing them what to do. He prefers that games do both simultaneously, and looks down upon the fact most games feel the need to stop everything for a cutscene to zoom in on and introduce the first monster before the player gets to try and fight them. He especially mocks Doom Eternal for this, as it not only stops the game with an informational popup before an enemy encounter, but provides literal instructions just telling you what their weaknesses are and how to fight them.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: For an Invoked example, the sponsor promotion after the review of Skull and Bones has Yahtz find out about a movie called The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Believing it will be a good watch for the kids because they misbehave at bedtime, he finds out mid-watch that the film's actually about The Holocaust. Yahtzee's kids are visibly crying thick streams of tears at the movie's scenes.
  • Writing Around Trademarks: Yahtzee put a lot of the video's design aesthetic and writing style into making it clear this is a continuation of his old show without actually mentioning his old show due to The Escapist keeping the rights to it.
    • Whereas he uses a variety of colors for the background, he notably avoids using yellow.
    • He uses round-bodied, pointy-limbed black creatures to represent nonhuman enemies, but they're based on his dog Toffee rather than being the imps.
    • Humans are represented with simple floaty-limb'd figures with boots, but they're all wearing round-toe boots instead of pointed ones as well as universally wearing glasses that make their eyes look bigger. Yahtzee himself is wearing mostly black, including his hat, and has a pair of squared off glasses.
  • You Don't Look Like You: Played With: in some reviews when he depicts a character from the game he's reviewing, sometimes he'll use a similar-looking character or person with some noticable differences, rather than using the actual character from the game. So Alyx Vance stands in for Beyond Good & Evil's similarly-headbanded, tan-skinned Action Girl Jade, Eric André replaces the curly-haired Ichiban Kasuga of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Keanu Reeves portrays the likewise long-haired-and-bearded Alan Wake in his eponymous sequel.

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