#steak bentleys 3 and a half hour metal gear solid 4 video is engaging and awesome and informative in a completely different way

[lord-radish]

Also I've been watching a lot of YouTube while I play games lately. I finished a 12 hour video about every single season of the American version of Survivor earlier this week, and I just finished a six hour long video about a Japanese video game called Boku no Natsuyasumi:

And I have to say, this video is a masterpiece.

The cover art in the thumbnail is a fake interpretation of what the art might have looked like if the game was localised to America. The actual game is set in the Japanese countryside over the entire month of August in 1975, where the main character is staying with his aunt and uncle while his parents prepare for the birth of their second child. It never left Japan, and its presentation makes it next to impossible to localise.

I don't want to spoil too much of the video or its premise, but I do want to talk about a couple of anecdotes from the video.

The guy in the video, Tim Rogers, worked at Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan circa 2005-ish. Boku no Natsuyasumi was getting a PSP remaster, and a cool coworker of his urged him to try the game out. His section manager overheard the conversation and the coworker mentioned the game, and the section manager gave Tim an uncomfortable look and told him not to play the game.

The video discusses nostalgia and how it can be successfully transfered across cultural boundaries. It's not your nostalgia, but enough reverence and craft can communicate a foreign yearning for the past even if your personal nostalgic past is very different. Nostalgia is a state of mind that everyone experiences; a Japanese person can enjoy Stand By Me, and by that token, an American (or Australian, in my case) person can enjoy Boku no Natsuyasumi.

The video has a heavy emphasis of sunflowers from beginning to end, stemming from an iconic scene in the game with a field full of sunflowers. Tim's home state of Kansas is mentioned, as is his time living in Tokyo, playing Boku no Natsuyasumi over a weekend while his girlfriend was visiting family.

By the end of the video, the emotion is palpable and it's really fucking hard not to cry.

It's a masterful, dense, soothing and informative six hours. But it's six hours of YouTube gamer video essay content. The runtime is obv. a huge hurdle, but it's genuinely a masterpiece and it goes places that might be a little too real. It's truly outstanding.