YMMV / The Gamers: Hands of Fate

• Anvilicious: The movie has been described by some viewers as "30% story, 70% preaching." Many viewers (both male and female) applauded the film's strong stance against sexism in the gaming world. Some gamers (again, of both genders), however, were put off by the film's heavy-handed tone, and expressed disappointment that the franchise's theme of gaming seemed to take a backseat to the moral message in the third film. This was especially true of the extended version, in which the moral dominated both the main plot and one of the two subplots (the Lodge/Joanna relationship storyline, which was all about the moral and had nothing to do with gaming at all).
• Audience-Alienating Premise: The previous two Gamers movies parodied tabletop roleplaying games. This one has virtually nothing to do with those and instead is about collectible card games instead. Just like the film characters, only a subset of gamers are interested in both.
• Ensemble Dark Horse
  • Jase, for being a Nice Guy doing his best to keep The Alliance together and always being cheerful about gaming and everything around him.
  • The Meach is surprisingly popular, most likely because he combines many traits of professional player with Cool Old Guy tendencies and a bit of Insufferable Genius, who easily plays everyone like pawns to reach his own goals.
• Nightmare Fuel: Myriad's climactic confrontation with undead Dundareel is incredibly creepy.
• Padding: The entire Chibi-chan subplot, which is loathed by pretty much everyone as a time-stealer from the tournament plot or character development time that could be used for Natalie, The Meach or Jase. It's especially obvious in the regular cut, where a lot of different stuff is cut, but the Chibi-chan arc stays intact.
  • In regular cut, what's left out of Lodge-Joanna arc is an incomprehensive mess, but still takes running time.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Lodge and Joanna's relationship issues take up a fair bit of runtime in the extended cut, and have so little to do with anything else that the regular cut removed it entirely without a trace (and reduced both to cameos).
• The Scrappy: Lodge and Joanna in extended cut due to listed above problem, along with Gary and his Chibi-chan antics didn't won any favours from audience. General consensus among the fandom is that cutting their subplots would improve the movie greatly and remove almost all of its heavy-handed preaching without losing anything plot-important.

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