An "accolades trailer" is one that features gameplay and cinematics overlaid with glowing review scores and kind words from outlets such as ours—this one from the brilliant What Remains of Edith Finch is a fine example. Today, Square Enix released an accolades trailer for The Quiet Man, the live-action adventure/brawler about—as I understand it—a deaf guy who kicks ass in memory of his mom.
At this point you may be wondering how a game that Tyler described as "spectacularly bad" before he gave up in disgust could possibly be worthy of such a thing. The short answer is that it's not. The trailer is in Japanese, and the auto-generated English subtitles aren't exactly precise in their syntax, but there's no mistaking the quotes from the reviews:
- "Inexplicable"
- "Catastrophic failure"
- "Worst Joke of the Century"
- "Trashhhhhhhhh"
- And yes, our take on it is in there too:
If you're wondering why exactly Square Enix would embrace the awfulness to this extent, I can think of two possible explanations. One, there's no saving it, so capitalizing on the carnage Sharknado-style is the only thing left to do. Or two, and this is the apparent goal of the trailer, Square Enix intends to highlight how the game changed once the intentionally missing audio and subtitles were added. The final quarter of the trailer quotes user reviews apologizing for calling it trash and saying that they cried after the update. (Presumably because it was such a revelation, although I suppose watching 15 bucks swirl down the crapper could elicit a similar response.)
So in the end, I guess it's a legitimate accolades trailer, but it suffers from the same basic issue as the game itself: It comes out hard as a rip-roaring mess and by the time it gets to the part where it's time to tell everyone that it's actually good, we've all had our laughs and moved on to something else.
Beyond that, there's also the question of whether the aural addition actually improves the game in any meaningful way, a claim our Quiet Man man disputes. "It would've been bad even if there were a good story. The fighting is terrible," he said in response to this video. "I also refuse to believe the dialogue makes it good." He has not played it with the subtitles, to be fair. He refuses to.
If you want to roll the dice anyway, The Quiet Man is currently on sale for $11/£8/€11 in the Steam Winter Sale.
