Web Video / Dark Lord Jadow 1

DarkLordJadow1 is a video game reviewer online. He usually reviews bad games from the Wii and the PC, but he has reviewed games for other systems. He is one of the numerous reviewers who has incorporated a running plot into some of his reviews, for better or worse, although the plot doesn't pop up in all his reviews. He has also reviewed a few movies here and there. He can be found on YouTube here.

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Relevant tropes:

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: In-universe, when recapping the top ten worst games he's reviewed thus far, he states- with audible irritation- that many people do not believe that Pokémon Stadium 2 has a glitch that erases Yellow version's save data and insist that his Yellow's battery just died when his cartridge's data was erased.
• April Fools' Day: Done multiple times over the course of his time on YouTube.
  • In 2023, he did a review of a piece of PS4 shovelware called My Riding Stables: Life With Horses. However, he would go on tangents that lead to him splicing in reviews of two games by the infamous Gilson B. Pontes. In between Gilson's games, he calms down and goes back to properly reviewing Riding Stables again.
  • In 2022, he had a video titled "Battleship (Xbox 360) Video Game Review". He sings a parody cover of the song "I want it that way" by the Backstreet Boys titled "I bought that Bad Game". He even edits it like a music video including live-action skits from him, and stock footage of both himself and the games he's reviewed.
  • In 2021, he made a video titled "Zack Snyder's Justice League Review", where he sleeps for a half-an-hour with a Kirby plushy. Randomly during the video, he will break out in song, which can be startling since the rest of the video is dead quiet.
  • In 2020, he did a video titled "Honest Trailers | Beware the Batman" where he imitates the Honest Trailers style with an eight-minute parody for the Beware the Batman TV series.
  • In 2015, he did "DLJPlays Superman 64-1" which shows him complaining about how quick and easy the game is. It then ends with a shot of Superman's emblem and the words "April Fools", plus the explicit mention that he used the in-game level-cheat code to shoot through the game and then pretend-whine about its brevity.
• Apocalyptic Log: His review of Air Control begins with Jadow nowhere to be seen. The entire review is told through a "Gamer's Log" cataloging his ongoing thoughts on the game. When Jadow turns up at the end of the video, he's... not well.
• Berserk Button: Online players who only play to win, spamming overpowered attacks or tactics to win at any cost. DLJ cites Call of Duty, Super Smash Bros. and multiplayer-only games as being rife with them.
  • Games that copy mechanics from more popular ones, but botch or otherwise screw the execution.
  • When his viewers strongly disagree with his opinions and express that fact in a not so polite way.
  • His October persona, David S. Pumpkins, really doesn't like being compared to Doug Walker since they both wear the same jack-o'-lantern patterned blazer in October. For this, he rips Billy the doll apart with hooked chains.
  • Ever since his review on Anthem, Jadow always goes on a rant whenever he reviews a Perpetual Beta released with the excuse of being a Live Service game (Bonus points if the game is a looter shooter game).
• Caustic Critic: He can be this way sometimes with games that especially piss him off. But it is usually subverted as he will give props to good parts of games. He even has a positive review of the Wii version of Battleship.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: In the review for Knack, Jadow starts off talking about the unusually defensive nature or articles on Knack and even comments on the game's page on this very wiki, and shortly into the review he receives a call from the "Sony Executive", a deep-raspy-voiced man (also played by Jadow) who spends the whole review overly justifying the various design choices that Jadow criticizes and pretends the game is pure gold with no other motivation. In the second review, Knack 2, Jadow calls the executive (who was conspicuously absent) and he outright admits that Knack 2 didn't do nearly as well as Knack 1, so he could hardly care less about it.
• Determinator: He is one of the few people to ever beat Superman 64.
  • Special mention goes to his review of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys on the Nintendo 64. In the part 2 of his review, he lost his save data, rather than cancelling the review, he decided to complete the game again despite that game being really tedious, boring, and frustrating.
  • Another testament to his pure determination is his review of Metroid: Other M. To give some background info, the longest review of this was 32 minutes. To show that he's just as good as any other video game reviewer, he does an 80 minute, four part review.
  • In general, he tries to get through as much of a game as he possibly can, no matter how painful the experience. In the event a game is seemingly unbeatable due to shoddy programming, he'll stop at the point where progression is widely believed to be impossible.
• Disproportionate Retribution: He gave Activision's games bad review. Activision's response: Send an assassination squad to kill him and retake their games.
  • The motivation for Evil Sonic in Episode 200 isn't revealed until near the end of the video, but when it is, Jadow is shocked by how juvenile it is.
  • During the X-Men: Destiny review, he spends the latter half of the episode recounting how awful Denis Dyack (former President of Silicon Knights) was when he fired a huge chunk of his staff because they were upset by work crunch and hostile management, and how Denis' reply was to actively try and remove them from the credits of the game ^note Activision wouldn't let him so he went with the pettiest option he could: reduce all those who left to "Special Thanks credits" so you can't tell what any of these people did on the game
  • Jadow was harassed by numerous people for his negative review of No Man's Sky for a variety of reasons, many imagined or unfair (some were mad he didn't re-review the game after the updates despite him explicitly saying his review was of the at-the-time build which was still fully released). Between threats, attacks, and his Twitter almost being hacked, he was infuriated with the community, and admits to hating No Man's Sky even more thanks to its toxic fandom.
    Jadow:When I quit No Man's Sky I merely disliked it, now I actively hate it's weaselly-black guts out because being a toxic fan online turns more people against you... although some viewers just respectfully disagreed with my opinion... you guys are cool.
• Drunk with Power: He gets... excited when playing Aero Fighters Assault and finding a Gameshark code that lets him perform the mother of all missile spams.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: His earlier videos mimic the Zero Punctuation style VERY closely, almost to the point of Gimmick Infringement. Jadow's early vid's also have noticeably lower quality Audio and Video due to the fact he was recording everything using his laptop's built-in Mic and Camera.
• Funny Background Event: While reviewing Carmageddon 64 and starting a new game he enters his name as "IMFUCKED".
• Good Flaws, Bad Flaws: His review of The Killing Joke argues this:
  "Adding characterization isn't automatically a good thing, not when you just dump and dog pile negative traits onto a character until there's nothing likeable left. You can add character flaws, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it."
• Heroic BSoD: Literally; Part 2 of his review of Metroid: Other M ends with him screaming before cutting to a blue screen after a particularly infamous scene in the game.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!invoked: While it is easy to consider him to be a firm believer of this, particularly when it comes to kids' games, he actually discussed in his Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric review in saying that a game doesn't have to be difficult, it just has to be stimulating.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: Exaggerated in his review of several games by Ensenasoft, when he has to complete the game by clicking on the right book, in a generic, non-descript bookshelf, without the game telling him he needed to find a book.
  "This isn't even a needle in a hay-stack. This is a needle in a stack of needles, without even having the first clue that you're looking for a needle in the first place!"
• No Indoor Voice: Depends on how bad the game is, he could just be calmly describing the game or he could be ranting and raging like mad.
• Precision F-Strike: When he does say the F-word, It's usually for the game that frustrated him.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: He does a lot of this in his Other M review, particularly the second part:
  KISS! MY! ASS!
  WHAT! DO! YOU! WANT! FROM! ME!
  WHAT! AM! I! SUPPOSED! TO SHOOT!
• Running Joke:
  • Whenever the name "Dennis" is spoken, expect Jadow to either scream it out loud or utilize various clips from Late Night host Seth Meyers screaming that same line.
  • From videos after his review on the first Saw videogame, whenever he makes a comment praising a female character design too much, expect his Krystal plush to get angry at him, hurting him as punishment.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: He typically never swears above words "shit" and "bitch" but if he does he will usually bleep it out. Since his review of Rodea the Sky Soldier, the bleeps are replaced with the backwards-sounding yell of "EFF!" similar to Coiffio's, which was also used in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series.
• Suddenly Shouting: During his review of several Ensenasoft games, he reviews a hidden object game, The Hidden Dragon, which looks childish but is immensely difficult. At one point, he asks the viewer to pause the video and find the one item he hasn't found yet.
  DarkLordJadow1: I am not kidding, dead serious, pause this video, and don't push play until you either find the arrow, or concede defeat.
  [...]
  DarkLordJadow1: (calmly) Okay, let's use the game's hint system and find out where that arrow is!
  *hint reveals that the arrow was hidden behind part of the UI*
  DarkLordJadow1: ARE YOU F[*Sound-Effect Bleep*]ING KIDDING ME!? IT WAS HIDING BEHIND THE F[*beep*]ING HEADS UP DISPLAY!?
• Take That!: He will take potshots at DC movies that bombed whenever it seems appropriate.
  • He takes a few at the PMC Blackwater in his review of the video game of the same name, given that the group it's promoting A) committed literal war crimes, and B) was already shut down by the time the game came out.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Most of his review are this to the given game. However, he does this to specific characters from time to time.
  • He gives one to Mikiko in part 2 of his [[Video Game/Daikatana]] review. ^note Mikiko's motivation for betraying her friends at the end of the game is to avenge the honor of some ancient barbarians and thieves that she's distantly related to. This is one of the thinnest motivations you could possibly imagine.
  • He gives many of these to both Samus and Adam over the course of his Metroid: Other M review. ^note Samus for constantly handicapping herself in a futile and desperate bid to please an abusive surrogate father figure; Adam himself for treating Samus like shit the entire game and regularly putting her and his marines at risk by arbitrarily limiting her weapons.
  • General Rahm Kota is on the receiving end of one in Jadow's Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II review.
  • He gives a major one to Dr. White in his Mighty No. 9 review. ^note The entire plot of the game is Dr. White's fault, Dr. White is a total hypocrite preaching non-violence while making living building fighting robots, and he's generally a coward that runs away from all of his mistakes; even leaving his own father to rot in prison when Blackwell stops Trinity's initial breakdown.
  • He gives one to Peter Parker in his Spider-Man: Edge of Time review. ^note Peter insists on staying in the future in a selfish bid to protect his loved ones; despite having just been told that he's vital to the timeline and his intended actions would lead to countless deaths. Furthermore, Peter only abandons his plan when someone he personally knows is put in danger.
  • He gives a big one to Mitchell in his Hunt Down the Freeman review. ^note Through the entire second half of the game Mitchell seems to go out of his way to harm mankind (already enslaved by the Combine) as much as possible; refusing to join the resistance for twenty years for no apparent reason and helping to kill the Resistance (possibly dooming mankind once and for all) for a chance at petty revenge on Gordon Freeman.
  • There's the speech he gives the evil Sonic who terrorizes him in the plot of "Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) Review - EPISODE 200". The beginning of the episode implies he's been trying to physically overpower the evil Sonic to no avail who has supernatural powers and has supposedly killed him numerous times. The evil Sonic states he has to win once to be freed. Towards the end of the video, Jadow finally gets him to spill why he's frustrated and doing this to him, and it turns out it is solely because of the reviews and nothing else because they were negative. Jadow is so speechless over evil Sonic's toxic attitude, that he calls evil Sonic out and yells at him that the purpose of his reviews is solely entertainment and discourse, and he couldn't care less about people liking or disliking things he hates or loves, because everyone is allowed to have an opinion. Evil Sonic tries to strawman him by implying Jadow is saying "I am the only one allowed to have an opinion", but he sets the point straight and then calls out how he is winning this. He cannot take a physical victory, but the moral victory has been his the whole time
    JADOW: You said I need to win one fight between to get out of here, but I got news for you, jackass: If I'm living in your head rent-free over my taste in movies or fuckin' videogames, then you can hurl all the abuse you want, 'CUZ I'M THE ONE WHO'S WINNING!!!
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: He dislikes games with this kind of gameplay as he has a full time job and often doesn't have the time commitment to play levels over and over again and still get reviews out in a timely manner.
• Visual Pun: His third special on Steam Indie games includes several shots of his computer's desktop. His wallpaper is an image of the Steamlord from Metroid Prime 3.