Trigger warning: If you have photosensitive eyes or suffered any photosensitive seizure (symptoms), then the explosions of color and rapid movement from the video game trailer may bother you. Watch here at your own risk.

Cross-posted from: Canterlot Times on Tumblr.

A few days ago, Mighty No. 9 was released after several years of development hell. After so many people were excited, the release of the game felt more like a thud than a cheer.

But that’s not what this is about. On May 25, Deep Silver published a trailer for the game, titled Masterclass. Suffice it to say, the trailer sucks. Why? Several reasons.

1. One of the biggest rules in any form of media is show, don’t tell. In storytelling, exposition risks killing investment your audience has on a book, episode, or movie. Why? Because we’re being told of the material. When telling, we don’t see the material the characters experience themselves, and when the show does happen, it can become very underwhelming.
    
   This rule applies in advertising, too. Throughout the 85-second ad, a stereotypically-1990s dude narrates. He keeps telling us about how awesome the moves, abilities, and powers are through some very corny jokes, one-liners, and a bunch of other bull rubbish. Your audience doesn’t have to have every single detail shoved directly in their faces. This is a visual/audio commercial; they’re not listening to the radio! Instead of hyping up the game, the stereotypical narrator is destroying the hype by shoving in the supposed “qualities” in our faces without giving the audience any opportunity to gauge anything appealing.
2. The choice for narrator and script are absolutely horrible!
    
   To repeat about the narrator, he’s trying to sound like your typical “I’m-too-cool” and “I’m-really-hip” stereotype seen so often in the 1990s. Everything about his voice tries to rip off other successful products like Sonic the Hedgehog, only to fall flat. Except Sonic showed us he’s cool by his moves and little details in his expression in response to something. No smug narrator was needed to “help” him. In Masterclass, the narrator was attempting to act cool, only to act pretentious instead.
    
   And it doesn’t help with Masterclass’s hideous script. Either they tried too hard to be funny or didn’t try at all. The hallmark of a good joke are at least threefold: Do they make sense within the context presented, surprise your audience, and not signal vile stereotypes? Every joke here (including the infamous simile) was a surprise, but none of them make sense. They have no place in a commercial attempting to woo people into buying it. Rather than being funny, they were cringeworthy.
    
   The accent, jokes, and overall “attitude” the script and narration exudes blatantly panders to kids, yet I have no idea what Deep Silver attempted in their method. Were they pandering to kids by trying to parody the 1990s or pandering to kids by trying to make fun of people who lived in or were born in the 1990s? Whatever the case is, the creative decisions by DS were BS.
3. Saving this piece for its most notorious joke.
    
   “And make the bad guys cry like an anime fan on prom night.”
    
   No, no, no, no, no, NO!
    
   What’s wrong with this joke?
    
   a. It calls back a very sexist stereotype about how geeks are incapable of attracting anyone to go to a prom. Geek culture has a history of being stereotyped, spat on, and verbally assaulted for the past few decades. Brony-bashing and the association of fedoras and trilbies with “geeks” and “perverts” are recent examples. A few years ago, a female intern at Gizmodo shamed and outed a man because he was the 2000 world champion of Magic the Gathering.
    
   b. The pot’s calling the kettle black. Mighty No. 9 is unabashedly inspired by the classic Mega Man games and is considered to be a spiritual successor of it after Capcom continued to slump and treat its signature franchise poorly. MM, for the matter, had several spinoffs outside of gaming. One of them was anime.
    
   Look at Mighty No. 9 in any official image online. What does he look like? An anime character. The look resembled Mega Man and anime, and Mighty No. 9 was attempting to attract Mega Man and anime fans.
    
   Now think about the terrible analogy further. It’s a very terrible idea, period, to diss any audience, whether it’s the prime demographic, periphery demographic, or the rest. That line dissed anime fans/otakus, one of the demographics Comcept and Inti Creates are trying to sell MN9 to!
    
   There’s a gigantic difference between mocking stereotypes and using stereotypes to mock. Masterclass uses the opposite. That “joke” is the worst line I’ve ever heard in a trailer and will go down as one of the worst lines in commercial history.
    
   Take it from someone who’s educated in advertising and how it works: NEVER insult who you’re trying to sell to!

I don’t play games anymore, but if I was looking to perhaps buy one, and I see this trailer, then the publishers and developer would’ve lost a potential buyer. The purpose of a trailer or commercial is to hype the audience into buying the game. If your customers are instead bashing the game’s graphics, development hell throughout the process, the blatant pandering to kids, and the stereotypes used to promote this game, then something’s wrong.

This horrible “trailer” has no redeeming value. To everyone aspiring to be an advertising/graphic designer or creative, use Deep Silver’s massive errors here as a lesson on how NOT to advertise.