I cliked "watch later" 10 years ago.
Here I am.

Man, this vid is good watching in 2019...

One little correction, just for the sake of historical truth. The last pagan country of Europe was not Poland but Lithuania, its medieval cousin.

Obama receives The Witcher, the Pope receives Undertale. Have games became cultural gifts or something while I was asleep or what

"Some of the most interesting games out there are the most flawed."
Gothic.Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines.KotOR 2.

Oh! The horse is named after a fish! That makes sense!

So... Get drunk with Talar he is going to give you a book. Read it, and take it to the cleaning-shoes guy. He will realise that you know who he is, and he is going to give you a ring. This ring is being respected by old people, so put it into your finger and show it to Shanis grandma. This way she will be no problem at all.

The first Witcher feels like the awkward teen phase of the series, what with how janky everyone looks and behaves, how awkwardly stilted the conversations are, and how the gender relations and outlook to sex might very well have been taken from group conversations between male 9th-graders. It just presents itself with such fiery passion and naiveté, I can't but love it in all it's pimpled, voice-cracking, teen-moustached glory.

"I'll talk about the game, and spoil the ending of the book without any WARNINGS!"

Witcher 1 gave me a headache a lot of the time when I played it. But 30 percent of the time it gave me a very dreamlike feeling that only Vanilla WoW has managed to do to me. Great game.

Minor smartassery: Lithuania was the last pagan country in Europe, not Poland.

I started replaying the series after the netflix show dropped. Witcher 1, I haven't played in a few years but I was pleasantly surprised with the attention to detail. For example, when it rains, NPC's will run for cover and even comment on the weather. NPC's will also remember who you sided with during the faction quests. Great series overall

Theirs so much heart in this game overall, i think that goes for the series though. The creators are passionate about their game, culture, and work and it pays off. It doesn't feel like it was made by a committee it feels like it was driven by one or a couple talented people. It  may sound strange but its very similar to Japaneses developers are run with one lead developer/director who runs the show. And i like that i always feel that is needed in the development cycle.

So this game has layers? So it's Shrek?

The Witcher 1 is a sleazy, shlocky b-grade fantasy game, not unlike the kind of low budget b-movie from the 80s you'd find on VHS in the back of a video store. And I love it specifically for that reason.

Dears SuperBunnyhop and SuperBunnyhop's Comment section,

It so happens that I'm polish, have read the books (be it a decade ago) and have plyayed the games. As such I would like to offer a few pieces of insight on the subject.

Firstly, in regards to the books themselves:
* The matter of sex firs off all (mostly to get it out of the way) - all along the series it is mostly pandering to a teenage boy audiance which is facilitated by Geralt's infertility BUT (in quite total opposition to the games) Geralt's never really looking for it. He's just a real magnet for women (on the account of him being the ultimate badass whith whom you can have unlimited unprotected casual sex).
* I' ve never seen a version of the book in english but I can tell you that accuratly translating the kind of language Sapkowski is using would be (in my humble opinion) practically impossible. The thing is written in a style quite clearly borrowed from (or at least paying homage to) Henryk Sienkiewicz - a prominent XXth century polish wrighter that engineered a form of polish that would (in his mind) fit the renaissance settings of his multiple novels while still being comprehensible to the contemporary reader. Add to that the fact that, in hindsight we know that (despite his best efforts) his version of old polish has very little to do with the way actual XVth century polish nobles might have talked and you get a linguistic and cultural construct that just cannot be translated. I think...
* As to the structure of the universe, well, (and here we're entering personal opinion land, but I'm pretty convinces by my take on it) the novellas are quite different from the "saga". The novellas establish the basic premise (which is probably why people told you to read them first) but they only really do that. And concerning that particular matter: the novellas are essentially fairy tales. With all the outlandish goofy elements of fairy tales contrasted with a healthy dose of (CYNICAL) down to earth realism. Imagine Ariel the Mermaid Princess that falls in love with a human Prince and goes thru a painful (and permanent) magic ritual that will transform her tail into legs. She leaves her home, forever, forsakes her family and friends for true love. The Princes father then convinces his son that this kind of marriage is finantially and dynastically unviable and that the girl poses a threat as she might spread the rumor that the young Prince sleeps around (with filthy freaks no less!).So she gets burnt at the stake for wichcraft. This is the basic model for the novellas - subverted fairy tales.
* Geralt himself is another matter. He is the ultimate hero. Or even Hero (in the ancient greek sence). The premise being that a arthurian/greek Hero never looses, not really. The problem is that this kind of character would be REALLY boring or REALLY goofy. Geralt gets TRASHED in more than one encounter (even thou he wins in the end) which gives him some basic believability. Than comes the witcher part that essentially makes him an ubermensch of sorts. Furthermore we learn that he is an exceptionally skilled witcher. All of these elements (hopefully) let him remain credible while he remains virtually invincible.
* Further concerning Geralt: he actually is not cynical. To the contrary - he is a hardcore idealist at heart. He just presents a wall of cynicism to the world in order to protect himself from the ruthlessness of said world. But that is very much what we learn about him as the story progresses.
* Dandelion (named Jaskier in the origial version) is to Geralt pretty much as Homer would be to Heracles. He recounts the deeds and of this face-destroying human army in a way that ommits all the curse words, all the violent rape scenes, and all the scenes where the victime of said violent rape finds herself in a worse position than if her "hero" would not have saved her from the assault as now she will probably be sold to a pimp that actualy kills girls. The entire book is written with a premise that formulates kind of like this: this is how these fairy tales would have have hapenned if they had internal consistency.

Now concerning the games (well... mostly the Witcher 1 as you mostly talk about the Witcher 1):
* Your point about the colorfullness of the world that is marketed as "dark fantasy" is spot on and I would just like to add that this is due to the fact that these ARE supposed to be fairy tales taken seriously - the seriousness comes from the things that happen thou, not from the setting itsef.
* Chapter IV was certainly my favorite part of the Witcher 1 (and thematically of all the series really). It just drowns (in a good way) in arthurian myth and polish folklore. I'm not going to go into much detail here but the quest about the two sisters who became wraiths just before the eldest's wedding day is a retelling of Słowacki's Balladyna (google it) which is a play every polish person knows. Arguably the pending wedding feast (lost in a limbo of merrymaking blindly waiting for the object of the festivities to join them while said girl (/concept) is long dead) is a retelling of Wyspiański's Wesele (Wedding) google it 2.0). Even the arthurian mythology isnt out of place. Medieval Poland (around the 1200s when the witcher ostensibly takes place (on its own time line that seems to, rather conveniently, use a calendar systhem fiendishly similar to ours)) was a Roman Catholic country, with mostly Catholic elites, and a still quite pagan deep countryside. My point being that he arthurian mythos was commonly known to the contemporary polish nobility while the common people might still call forth the spirits of their dead ancestors once a moon year (or something along those lines).

Additional note:
I really found the offering of a copy of the Witcher 2 to President Obama to be extramly cringeworthy (as anyone would I let myself presume) but it actually kind of makes sense (in it's own butt-clenching way). The game throws you in a DISTINCTLY west slavic high middle ages fantasy setting. It might be discreet to someone that knows nothing about west slavic culture, but that is the point. the Beatles certainly were distinctly british, and thru their success exported britishness outside of britain without anyone even noticing it. That what the Witcher does to a TROUMENDOUSLY LESSER DEGREE!!! But still...

TL;DR : Another great video! Thumbs up!

Actually, George, the English translation of the Witcher is a scandal. It's not just that it is horribly bad, it is actually full of holes. I played through the Witcher twice, with Polish voices and English subs (I'm not Polish, but I understand the language) and almost every character will say like 5 sentences in Polish, but you will see only one or two in the English subs. I don't know if the publisher or the devs were in charge of the English translation, but whoever did it simply didn't do their job. And I'm not just talking about flavour dialogue here, I had to replay through the end of act 3 at least three times, loading an autosave from 20mn ago, because there is some crucial dialogue that is just cut in the English subs! To make it worse, it seems like the other versions have been translated from the English text, not the Polish original. I tested the French version, and the cuts were the same... W2 and W3 are a lot better in this respect, because the devs wrote both ENG and PL versions simultaneously as they were developping the game. I still find the Polish version is better, but for W2 and 3 that's a subjective opinion.

As someone from Poland, I'd like to thank you for the amazing care and attention to detail I can see just by looking at how you documented your research. I always felt that people from western cultures miss the point of The Witcher, but your awareness of how CYNICAL the material is seems to demonstrate that you came as close to understanding what the whole franchise is about as one from outside culture can. THANK YOU!

"European" folklore, "european" totems... More like Polish. Each country has it's history and are vastly different from each other. I'm tired of americans using the word Europe as it were the United Sates.

One of the things that I found most impressive when playing the original Witcher is its implementation of drinking. You can develop resistance to certain alcohols and try to outdrink NPCs, but there are so many robust and unpredictable outcomes when trying to win.