It’s finally done and revealed! The HaKox video! Should it have been a secret? I dunno. I talk about the things I’m playing so much that I rarely get to put out a video without blabbing my thoughts on 30 billion places first. I thought it’d be fun to let people get a new video with some fresh thoughts in a reasonably well-developed way first and foremost.
Admittedly, being related to the Xeno series, my gut always tells me my audience may not necessarily be interested (and the stats generally show that.) But hopefully, you took a look. Even if you’re not a Xeno fan, HaKox is a very cool game.
It’s also, thankfully, one of those videos where pretty much any footage can be thrown down and work, making the editing pretty easy. However there are some moments that I was a bit picky, particularly around character movements.
Anyway, let’s talk about the good and the bad!
Bad
I Included Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is a bit of a meme for the Xeno series and, at times, it’s a bit of a crutch for me to poke fun at the Xenosaga. While I was able to make it come around full circle in the end, I still think it was low-hanging fruit that probably should have been left untouched.
My work-in-progress Soma Bringer video also brings up Jesus Christ, but I will probably try to eject him from it if possible. It’s an overplayed joke, and I think the less I use him going forward, the better.
I position this video as a Xeno video.
How you sell a puzzle game within another game is hard to do. But one thing I’ve consistently seen on my channel is just a general lack of interest in Xeno content. If anything, my Xeno videos typically get the most dislikes of anything I make, though they usually are my more controversial takes so makes sense.
That aside, the only Monolith Soft video I’ve ever done that’s performed is my Xenoblade Chronicles 3 one, which mostly got attention for being in the release window.
That’s not me saying I shouldn’t do Monolith Soft content, but presenting it as face value as I do has rarely paid off, so I probably should try to position the videos from different angles whenever possible. Despite that, I keep going against that better judgement.
That being said, I don’t know if there was really any other way I could have presented HaKox. Maybe in a video about mini-games within other games?
Ultimately, the video did better than I expected, which is a win for me. Any time a video released outside of any relevant events can break 100 views in two days, that’s a great start.
I didn’t mention the game’s length.
HaKox only takes about 2ish hours to get through. I don’t mind that, and I talk about it a lot in the ranking video I did on OCP+, but I forgot to mention it in any way in the video. So, hopefully, I’m not leading anyone to misunderstand the depth of HaKox.
There’s also a great argument that HaKox lacks the replayability of other puzzle games because you can “solve” levels. Not that I think that kills the video, just something I thought about after the fact that would have been nice to mention.
Good
There was good energy to the video.
The one compliment I got across the board was people mentioning that I seemed passionate about it. It’s hard for me to make videos about things I don’t care much about. But HaKox is a video I was genuinely excited to make and was focused mostly on positive feelings, so I was happy it came across in the video.
For years my scripts could come off as a bit dry so I’ve been trying to pump a little more of my speech patterns into them for better or for worse. You can go back and see me kind of awkwardly try this back in the Aconcagua video. It sounds really bad and like an editing mistake. I think most of my verbal stumbles in HaKox sound more natural, like when I’m stumbling over myself at the ridiculous fact that I ranked HaKox over every other Xeno game in my Monolith Soft ranking list.
It was light video topic-wise.
The Babylon’s Fall video is heavy, with me trying to sympathize with developers, players, reviewers, and everyone under the sun apparently. Doesn’t help that the game’s OST kind of only went from slow, brooding ambient songs to sweeping opera music, so my writing was kind of paced to that. Dog of Bay didn’t have that issue so much, but it did still touch on the topic of looking below the surface of people and the game itself.
HaKox is just good fun, and I think it was a nice break, given the previous two videos are the only things that came out this year. To some extent, I feel like, “What’s the point of telling you about a game you’ll probably never play or, at best, add to your bucket list.” But in this case, I think it’s alright. Though maybe you can view it as a part of a greater approach I’ve taken to smaller-scale games where I’m trying to give them full consideration as games, even if they seem simple and unremarkable on the surface. That wasn’t the intention when starting the HaKox video, but I can at least retroactively see that possible influence.
Got some cool art, dude.
I worked with Cargodin on creating the thumbnail art. There’s almost nothing I could use for HaKox visually that would be all that interesting in a thumbnail, so I was happy to work with her. It’s faithful to HaKox, drew attention to the Xenosaga characters, and also emphasized some of the playfulness that may not come across as much in the video. Most of that silliness is in the voice clips, which you only rarely hear in my video.
So I really appreciate her thumbnail kind of completing that image for me given I couldn’t really draw too much attention to that in the video.
Wrap Up
Anyway, that’s it for that! We’ll see if it eventually gets some traction down the line (My NieR video’s launch was abysmal, but it’s now my most popular video, so anything can happen.) I may try to see if I can do something not Xeno-related before put out the other Xeno video I have been working on, but we’ll see where the winds of my impulses take me. Thanks again to everyone who watched and shared the video! I hope you enjoyed it.
