I am starting to watch that video. I'll edit this post as I go along to add more of my response to what he says. But I'm not going to post any spoilers.
At 2 minutes in, I'm already hearing untrue BS from him. He says, "There is no side content
at all." --- Yes there is, a whole lot. They are Lucas' optional side missions which the player can choose to do or not to do. But they are all amazing so they are always well-worth doing.
I am also not sure why he, and many others nowadays, refer to Mafia as an "open world" game. It is surely not an open world game, and thank God for that, because open world games usually suck.
He calls Mafia "a grounded story of greed and ambition...classic mobster stuff" - actually no, that's a huge over-simplification of Mafia's story and of the protagonist's nuanced and complex characterization. That quoted statement would apply perfectly well to Mafia 2 with its vastly inferior one-dimensional protagonist, but it does not apply to Mafia 1 like the video maker claims.
He says "The gameplay is much rougher than later titles [of Mafia]." I'm not sure what he means by "rougher," but Mafia 1's gameplay absolutely owns Mafia 2's much worse gameplay and Mafia 3's much worse gameplay.
He says "your interactivity even in terms of driving and shooting is more limited than what you find in later Mafia titles." I call BS on that. Mafia 1 lets you interact with the cars by setting their speed limit and getting pulled over by cops if you breach it, or if run red lights, or if you crash into other cars. Mafia 1 also lets you run out of gas, and fill up your gas at a gas station. I don't remember whether the Mafia 2 and Mafia 3 have gas or not (since they are dumbed-down, probably not right?), but they certainly limit player interactivity by having the cops ignore the players' violations of the rules of the road, as if the player is in a stupid cartoon arcade world rather than in a real world.
Similarly, Mafia 2's shooting gameplay is horribly
uninteractive. You are forced to spend 90% of every firefight glued behind a wall as part of that game's awful "cover system" mechanic. All you can do is point your crosshair and shoot as if you are a stationary person aiming at a carnival's shooting gallery. There is no combination of moving + shooting in Mafia 2. Mafia 2 is a throwback to the gameplay of 1985's
Duck Hunt for the NES --- and not in a good way! Here is a visual aid for readers who don't know what Duck Hunt is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-daxzVxrQI "He says going over 40 will net you a speeding ticket," as if it always does. That statement omits key information that it only nets you a speeding ticket
if a cop sees you do it. You can speed when no cops are around and you will never receive a ticket in that situation. He also says you can pull over or outrun them, but omits a third option that you can also do: you can fight them.
He says "Mafia doesn't do anything groundbreaking with its plot" --- I strongly disagree. Mafia is groundbreaking by featuring a gangster main character who is complex, nuanced, and three-dimensional. That is not the case for most gangsters in almost any gangster film. Typical gangster characters like Tony Montana and like the main character in Mafia 2 are one-dimensional caricatures.
He says "Mafia's voice-acting is frequently wooden" --- sheer BS. It's not. Mafia's voice-acting is phenomenal across the board.
He says the game has "poor pacing." No, it doesn't. It's sounds like he is hating on Mafia because it's not cartoony arcadey nonsense like GTA, and he doesn't have patience for a better type of game. None of that indicates any problem with the Mafia game.
I agree with his criticism of the racing level. It is indeed horrible and never should been put into the game. That's the only legitimate criticism I've heard from him so far (I'm 8 minutes into the video at this time of writing this sentence). I don't agree with his statement that the racing level is a digression from the plot, though. The story did an excellent job of justifying why the race has to happen in the way how it does.
He calls the combat clunky and the game extremely difficult. Those are subjective opinions. I didn't find it clunky. It can be difficult, but it's not extremely difficult (except perhaps for the final mission). It's not anywhere near as difficult as Dark Souls, for example. He also complains about dying a lot. IMO most likely he is just unskilled at the game.
Ditto for his complaints about being unable to aim and hit things, for which he blames the game. Those complaints indicate a lack of skill on his part, not problems with the game.
He calls Tommy Angelo "a little less of a multi-faceted protagonist than the next game's Vito Scaletta." --- That's just ludicrous BS, for reasons aforementioned.
A blatant example of him blaming the game for something that is his own fault: he criticizes the game's presentation of a section where you are
supposed to be walking down the street next to an NPC woman. He says "you run faster than her and have to wait for her to catch up." And he shows footage of him running past her, and then of him walking backwards to try and mitigate that problem, while his character has a conversation with her at the same time. That is indeed an awkward presentation, but
he chose to make it so by running and by walking backwards. If you don't want that scene to play awkwardly, then simply
walk (don't run!) next to her, and walk forward, not backwards. Then the scene plays out wonderfully, as it's meant to do.
He criticizes the game's story because things don't always go according to the characters' plans, and that causes them to require multiple attempts at achieving the same one goal. That's not a flaw. On the contrary, that's one of the things that makes Mafia
brilliant! It's just like real-life...nothing ever goes 100% according to plan. That's just not how life works! Kudos to the devs for reflecting that reality realistically in their game!
He says "the ending is a real clunker," but he offers no explanation about why he believes that to be so. The ending is actually amazing!
He calls the script-writing and voice-acting in Mafia 2 "so much more sophisticated and grounded" than Mafia 1. That's just ridiculous. Both games have excellent voice-acting so they are equal there. Mafia 2's writing and characterization is way worse, though. He says he didn't feel sympathy for Tommy because Tommy didn't feel real, whereas Vito did. How can that be so when Vito is a one-dimensional caricature who has no emotional or psychological depth, whereas Tommy has both in spades?
The majority of his comments about Mafia 2 are not about the game itself. He starts heavily veering off into talking about his personal SJW political agenda, and then he projects that agenda onto Mafia 2
as if it is promoting his SJW agenda like he wishes it were, even though it certainly is not. If anything, Mafia 2 promotes many anti-SJW messages.
Every single one of his complaints about Mafia 1 being cliched and predictable could be 100% applied equally well to Mafia 2. There is
not a single thing about Mafia 2 that hasn't been done millions of times before in mainstream gangster films & prison films. Yet he mysteriously omits criticizing Mafia 2 for being cliched and predictable (except for the prison shower scene which he does call out as a cliche...but he could just as well have said the same thing about
any other scene in Mafia 2). This is proof that he is not being fair & objective, because a fair & objective person would
apply the same standard to each game that he is critiquing. Instead of doing that, he applies different standards to Mafia 2.
Likewise, he praises Mafia 2's ending even though it is absolutely every bit as cliched as Mafia 1's ending is. As well, Mafia 2's ending sucks because it makes implications about the fate of one of the main characters, but leaves the player hanging as to if those implications actually materialize or not. In his commentary he assumes that they do, but the game itself does not say that; again, he is reading into the game what he wants to see, not what is actually there.
I think the reason why he praises Mafia 2's awful
glued behind cover 90% of the time, on-the-rails shooting gallery gameplay is because it's easy to succeed at and it requires little to no skill on the player's part. That does not make the gameplay good though. He is equating "easy" with "good" and that's a false equivalency. Mafia 1 is
supposed to be challenging so that the player will feel like
they've done Tommy's hard work with him: with the challenge comes those emotional rewards which make the struggle worth the pay off.
For his comments about Mafia 3, he continues veering heavily offtopic, but
even more so, in order to rant about his SJW agenda. His primary basis of praise for Mafia 3 is that it is directly & strongly pushing his SJW agenda. But that doesn't actually make the game good. If anything, it makes the game worse.
But the game is bad mainly because of its horrible gameplay and highly repetitive nature, the latter of which he
glosses over and justifies by saying "the devs were trying to give the players what they want." No, they weren't. What the players wanted was
a real sequel to Mafia 1, which is almost universally regarded - and rightly so - as the best Mafia game by far.
Instead of trying to give the players that, the devs of Mafia 3 tried to make a GTA clone that pushes their SJW agenda. To a large extent, the latter half of that equation "saves" the game and makes it great in the eyes of some critics - like him - because they will
praise anything that pushes their SJW agenda. To such critics, whether it's a good game or not is irrelevant.
