I've been following Mandalore for a long time, to the point where I remember when his videos used to include side-characters including a friend who always had food in his mouth. They used to be a lot edgier and as he sanitized his content over time, that stuff went away. None of his older videos are there anymore and nobody ever seems to know what I'm talking about.
As far as I'm aware backups don't even exist for most of these. The SWTOR video is just mcfucking gone. The cutoff point is roughly The Division and you can tell just by watching it that there are a lot of videos missing before it.
That said I like Mandalore when he plays to his strengths and that's his hour long videos where he goes over stuff like adventure games. His Mystery of the Druids and Limbo of the Lost videos are so cozy that it's not uncommon for me to put them on while falling asleep.
TehSnakerer, Civvie11, Sseth, Mandalore are pretty much all I watch on youtube nowadays that isn't music.
No you're not crazy, he used to have more before he began wiping a lot of his older videos. The TOR one was called 'An Honest Review of The Old Republic' or something like that and it was just him trashing the game the whole time.
Anyone in the know can piece together the type of progression that he followed. He was an active /v/ user in the late 2000s/early 2010s, which was reflected in the sort of content he made and what the subject matter was (his Shazbowl video is the most obvious indicator of this and I'm honestly shocked he never took it down). Being a /v/ user at this time likely also helped him learn about a number of games that he has made videos about, such as EYE: Divine Cybermancy, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and Mystery of the Druids just to name a few.
Around GG, he decided to try to take a more serious stance on game journalism and got involved with an indie game review group that I don't remember the name of but its logo was 3 blobs that were red, green, and blue in color. He even made a video advertising the group, but the video was taken down a long time ago. The channel didn't put out much if any content for the next couple of years after this. Very likely that he stopped browsing /v/ at this point like a lot of other users. Post GG /v/ clearly has no influence on his videos at all.
Couple years later, he would start releasing his content in the format that he's known for today. The style was still edgier than today, but not anywhere near what he was back in his 2010s /v/ phase. He had a list of fan recommendations that he would
never follow and would basically go down the line and make content based on whatever was next on the list. In Dec 2018, he put out a video discussing the channel's future and mentioned opening a Patreon, though he expressed fear that making videos for monetary compensation would hurt the quality of the channel. I don't remember when he opened it, but after he did he began to further sanitize his content and incorporate some fanservice like playing up his relation to Sseth and incorporating some fan content into some of his videos (although I don't think he does either of those things now). I think that around 2019 was when he started to nuke a bunch of his older content, possibly due to troller's remorse or because he feels it clashes too much with his modern content.
That is the best quick rundown I can give on Mandalore just based on what I remember. Point being that he was /v/tard, got influenced by GG, saw little success online outside of his channel, returned to Youtube and reformed his channel into a game review channel that focused on relatively unknown games or games popular on /v/ back when he was on 4chan, started making money and gradually began to change his style to be more inoffensive. It's unfortunate but it is what it is.
I don't really understand disliking Mandalore. He might be too dry for one's tastes, or review mostly things that don't interest you, but the production value and presentation have always been stellar. I can't really recall any pointless moralizing in any of the vids either, despite ample opportunity. I wind up liking him more than other reviewers because he doesn't seem to forget that his place is as a reviewer first and foremost, not his audience's parasocial surrogate friend.
The game was made by Germans, if memory serves, and Germans have a habit of saying it that way in certain dialects. Yiddish probably carried the akzent over there.
I don't really dislike him, but the issue is that if you know about the games he is talking about then he has nothing interesting to say. His actual game critique is pretty trash. The humor is basically gone so you have to rely on the game's native humor to keep things going. He doesn't talk about a random interesting topic or go into a full blown schizo-rant. So if you see a video about a game that you know about, then it's not even worth watching. But if you don't know about the game he is talking about, then I can see why it would be an interesting watch. And he is still introducing people to a lot of great games that are easily overlooked today, so I can never hate him on that virtue alone. I just don't need to watch him because he doesn't really offer me anything worthy of note.
