Final Fantasy XV "Review" - Patreon Trivia

Hey all! If you're new, this is how I end up giving trivia and fun facts about the video, as well as insights and notes about the process to my patrons. They're broken up by section and meant to be very general, so they don't have specific timestamps.

~~ Intro ~~
-The intro disclaimer exists because I was actually very afraid Square would attempt something. It just makes me feel better, I know it probably won't do anything. There's an offchance it might.
-Before I edited the intro, I edited the "Cup noodles" joke later in the review to see if I would like to make this video. I liked it, and began working on the intro.
-Almost all the clips in the intro were revised or changed at some point while making the video as I found better clips.
-The intro was originally too visually complex and fast and I edited it down.
-I originally played FFXV in 2017.  I remember nothing of that playthrough and I left disappointed.

~~ The Saga of Silly Names ~~
-All of the names that I read are the actual translations of their names (Latin -> English). The naming scheme for this game is rather interesting.
-In my opinion this is the part of the video where the most heavy editing works the best.
-The original idea for this video came when I was calculating with a friend how old every single King of Lucis had to be in order for there to be 113 kings, the answer is every king has to have sex at 17.
-I didn't know any of the names of BTS members or heard a single song from them until I made this video
-It was extremely hard to get footage of using a gun in this game because it was such a boring weapon that I frequently forgot to film it
-I didn't like talking about the combat or even doing the script for it. There were aspects to combat that I missed, I didn't want it to simply feel like a list of small features. It's just not a game where talking about the different kinds of group attacks is a very entertaining prospect. The only fun part for me in that regard was talking about how it screws up.
-Jimothy Ross is Ardyn's voice in this video, but he is also every character who says "What the fuck?"

~~ Some Crimes Can Never Be Forgiven ~~
-It was at this point that I gave up consistently naming each of the chapters and stopped caring. Entertainment first.
- I mention all of the Gods because my original plan was to have much more of the story in this video but I ran out of time discussing how broken it was.
-The decision to represent Solheim in the lore as Argentina is entirely arbitrary and is based on their flag alone
-The major function of this section is to set up the rest of the video's information.
-Showing the fall of Insomnia (The city being destroyed) was the most fun and yet most challenging part because I had to specifically edit the video such that it would avoid copyright. The clips therein are (Mostly) not from the game and are primarily from the Kingsglaive Final Fantasy XV movie. This being said, the skydiving joke is my funniest joke in the video and I loved making it.

~~Noctis Goes Grave Robbing for 2 Hours ~~
-It took me several tries to get Prompto's bad New York accent down at least plausibly enough for me to put it in the video.
-The entire section where I talk about the side content is one of those jokes I knew I had to make, and I bended the structure of the review around it. I knew that was going to be the format I was going to discuss side quests in- as a personal story of my experience, instead of an exact telling. This is what I feel gives my reviews flavor and style.
-I hate the sound of my voice.
-During the "Cup noodles" segment, I show art of Cup Noodles made to look like the official cover art of the game. I had just randomly asked for it on twitter because I wanted to use it for the thumbnail, then decided against it.
-The "Cup noodles" segment originally had louder audio that I filtered through a compressor to make less painful
-The section where I talk about Ardyn and the story more in depth is a remnant of how I thought the review would have more time for story. You will see why this is a problem later.

~~ Noctis vs. God ~~
-In the video this segment is called "Noctis beats up God" but in YouTube it's called Noctis vs. God in order to avoid the phrase "Beats up" occurring in the description. YouTube demonetizes fighting videos and I didn't want to risk that word combination triggering an automatic response.
-The segment where I talk about "Inbred designer Dogs" and show a specific breed is a breed called a Toadline, a highly inbred and nearly constantly suffering breed developed extremely recently.
-The segment where Ardyn rescues the crew and states the Volcano can "Turn your penis inside out" is one of my favorite examples of how my absurdist humor tends to work. Also, Jim's voice here was edited very subtly to contain reverb or echoes based on how far away Ardyn was standing from the camera.
-It was at this point I realized the other Gods were so rushed that they should not get the treatment that I gave to the first one and Ardyn, so I bought more time by summarizing faster.
-I never once had a God be summoned in the game and enjoyed the experience. It was either against useless enemies or ruining the final boss.
-I also realized I couldn't explain the full plot so me talking about how broken the Venice section of the game is has a secondary function of showing where we are going in the story without me needing to explain it. It's a great tactic.

~~ The Game has Stopped being Coherent ~~
-This is easily the hardest section to write. It was an absolute nightmare. In it, I made the hard decision to cut down Ardyn's story explanation and use it in order to talk about the incompleteness of the story, in favor of having a more solid explanation near the end to talk about the ending and therefore set up my "How to break the game" section with context. This took 2 days of rewriting to figure out in an elegant way- it's important to me that every next segment feel like a relatively natural continuation of the last one.
-When I list things, say, when I list the things that Ardyn "is" (Immortal, has stabbed my wife, can teleport). This is an extremely easy tactic to generate humor as a youtuber that buys time. It tells the viewer some info, but nothing they will truly remember. Other Youtubers with similar formats will do it constantly.
-I entirely cut a segment about the train, Ignis' blindness, and the gameplay section at Gralea to fit the rest of the review. 16 minutes is approximately my hard limit, any more and I am liable to get exhausted/ it isn't a viable model to spend longer making the videos longer than 16 minutes. The definitive edition of this video would essentially be 25 minutes.
-Getting to the end and explaining how the game was hard was a transition into breaking the game while also giving some plot detail. At this point I had to scrap a lot of the plot detail, and only give the essentials. A very hard decision, I felt extremely stressed.

~~ How to Break the Entire Game ~~
-This section required a lot of research into the dumbest way to get XP. Not the most efficient, the dumbest.
-I was wrong about how you can't skip the gondola ride in this section. Also, that detail PISSED OFF a lot of defenders of this game.
-To get more footage, once I was done cashing in my XP, I simply fought the turtle this way several times while recording.
-Because Ardyn has no dramatic buildup (due to the structure of the review and also how the game works) It necessitates me playing off the battle as a joke and creating a separate conclusion.

~~ Conclusion ~~
-This part of the video I regret the most because of how nothing from before flows into it smoothly. I like my idea of talking about the game seriously in the last minute though, especially because I was getting ridiculously fatigued by this point.
-The turtle thing was a required segment if I wanted to make the entire monologue about the ending photo. I like when jokes set each other up.