#'personality-based stuff I don't care about‚ pranks‚ and video game playthroughs'

[okayto]

Mini-Review: Polygon Unraveled

A video series that explores the dangers of taking video game lore and logic too seriously.

Or as others online put it:

A series of viral videos for the gaming website Polygon in which he slowly goes insane while talking about video games.

Brian David Gilbert tries to unravel game lore without losing his grip on reality.

Several years ago, this guy who somehow managed to exude cryptid vibes despite appearing to be the walking embodiment of an excel spreadsheet kept coming across my dash. I gleaned enough info to determine he was a YouTuber and promptly scrolled on.

A couple years later...I'll be honest, I have no idea how I actually came to watch any of this. At some point, someone on tumblr tricked me into watching a completely different channel, which showed me that there is, in fact, entertaining content on YT despite a preponderance of talking heads and intensely parasocial fandoms, and the Almighty Algorithm recommended me a a video with a title I couldn't ignore, probably The Perfect PokéRap.

Host Brian David Gilbert is to all appearances an unassuming besuited nerd with high charisma and an even higher ability to subject himself to mental torments in the form of reading in real life all 333 books in the video game Skyrim, calculating how much money in OSHA fines Mario would owe, and interviewing his mother as part of a mathematical process to determine the Game of the Year...during which she kindly says, "This is a lot of research into things that really have very little meaning."

"A lot of research into things that really have very little meaning" would be a great and accurate tagline. Unraveled tricks you into thinking it's about video game-associated nerdery, but actually refers to Gilbert's mental state.

At any rate, it's easy to see why this garnered attention: it's funny and full of the specific pedantry that fandoms enjoy, taking canon details seriously to their ridiculous conclusions.

The subject is video games, but I haven't play the majority of titles/series/franchises featured and enjoyed it all, so it should be accessible and enjoyable to people who similarly haven't. Clips and brief descriptions of games/gameplay/stories are included when necessary, which for me gave all the context I needed.

Because listen: you do not need to be familiar with any Legend of Zelda games to enjoy the hilarity of Gilbert and a non-gamer coworker trying to recreate 78 recipes from Breath of the Wild using only ingredients listed in the game (that is: very few ingredients). I don't need to know anything about Hideo Kojima or the games he creates (and to this day, I do not) to understand the humor of his character names, because Gilbert explains that particular brand of peculiarity in the course of generating an 11-page form that will help him generate his own similarly-kooky names. There are a minimum of three different song/musical interludes throughout this series that are enjoyable and impressive.

Final comments: Highly recommend. It's accessible and fun even with a very small amount of video game knowledge (the small amount I have via pop culture osmosis) and witty; Gilbert has a talent for spouting great one-liners that contribute to the preponderance of gifs on this website.

Subtitle availability: English captions (not auto-generated) are available!

Where to watch (USA, as of May 2024): A playlist (X) on Polygon's (@Polygon) Youtube channel contains all episodes. Polygon's channel contains literally thousands of other videos, so I recommend using the playlist regardless of whether you watch them all or just a few.

Start watching with: My best recommendation is starting from the beginning using the playlist, with Solving the Zelda Timeline in 15 Minutes, because individual videos are great but it's also fun to watch Gilbert increasingly, well, unravel. But if you want a few videos to sample, I'd start with any of these:

Every Sonic game is blasphemous

The Perfect PokeRap (live convention panel; trust me it's worth watching instead of the PokeRap-only video)

We made all 78 Breath of the Wild recipes in one day

Calculate your pet's HP with my 100% legitimate formula

I used The Sims to perfect my apartment

Status/Frequency: There are 28 videos total, most of which are 15-20 minutes long with only a handful of outliers. The series was released from 2018 to the end of 2020, when he left the company to pursue other projects.

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