There are two types of videos. 3 minute ticktoks and 2 hour video essays about “Hegelian philosophy hidden in the Adventures of the Gummi Bears”
There are also 10-hour “analysis” videos of video games that are inexplicably just narrating a playthrough with almost no actual analysis present.
The first channel that comes to mind is Joseph Anderson. I have no idea how his videos became so popular when his “critiques” are just reciting the plot of games.
He’s got some good videos, but I agree that the Witcher stuff (the bulk of his output for the last three years) is definitely like a shitty abridged LP
There’s a few of these that immediately come to mind, like the Oblivion one that was 12 hours long or something.
I think it would be much better if the first section of the analysis was a brief rundown of the game and its content, and then the rest of the video was devoted to certain themes, where those themes take place (by bringing up some parts of the content in more detail) and how those themes are used by the game developers intentionally or unintentionally, but that’s considerably more work than just narrating over a Let’s Play and saying “This is good” or “This sucks”
