Top tier cutscenes.
“I don’t understand, will it fight?”
Odysseus facepalms.
Arkantos mfw.

One detail you forgot to mention:

Whenever you lose most of your troops, AoM’s music shifts to a more somber and melancholic tone and stays like that until you retrain your army.

It’s as if the game is telling you “you used to have a big army. What the hell, man?”

AoE2 is a lot more balanced but damn Mythology was so in depth and creative. Everyone plays differently from the factions, their major gods, and even minor gods and their myth units. The music and sound too while you might not notice it at first is expertly crafted.

Speaking of AOM's faulty AI, I have to say as a kid I always thought it was intentional. As mythic units' special moves glitched out more often than normal soldiers, I used to assume it would represent how rowdy, proud and uncontrollable the mythical monsters were at war.

Years later I found out it was just an excuse I made for my favorite game's bad AI pathing and target selection

What really stuck with me in the opening cutscene was the sheer brutality of the monsters.

Seeing the minotaur strike a wounded warrior who had no chance against him was horrifying to me as a kid

1. The Atlantenas were my favorite civilisation tbh . They were basically this jack of all trades, master of none. Yeah, they had so much easy access to everything, but they didn't excell at anything either.

2. One of my biggest gripes with the game is that you can kinda tell that pieces of story and dialogue were cut pretty close to release. We know this because entire lines of dialogue that add so much more context have been datamined over the years.
The Titans DLC and the Antlantean Campaign was probably the biggest victim of this.

The story was good, but asked a ton of questions, introduced new elements and elaborated on very few of them.
Like, how did the Kastor and his group of Atlanteans get stranded if Ajax and Odysseus were leading them back to Greece? Were they banished since we know Agamemnon was pissed at Atlantis for ignoring the Trojan War? Did they get lost? Why did Ajax and Odysseus never bother looking for them, especially with Arkantos' son being one of the survivors? Did they assume they were dead? If so, Kastor being the one attacking them actually becomes a significant reveal and the lines that showcase Ajax interacting and actually bonding with Kastor over his similarities to Arkantos kinda heartwarming.

Its little questions and snippets like these that kinda make the story of the game as a whole bit less enjoyable.And its a shame because it was probably a budget and time issue rather than a lack of creativity.l as , again, we have a good idea of how much was cut super close to release and I genuenly hope Retold  takes the time to restore some of this content.

3. Last but not least, this is just geneally a good review. Funny, informative and brought back some nostalgia from having played this game all the time as a kid.

So many fond memories.
Imagine deleting the Poseidon statue and instawinning the campaign...and Athena going like "You dirty cheater"

My favourite thing was the fact that every unit had an "i" button where you could get additional information about the references and history/mythology behind them...even trees and fish had them which was just a super nice way of getting one interested and maybe understanding the developers thoughts a bit better.

Also, it will never not be funny to me to see Achilles riding away from Troy after the mission...

Reynold Sanity. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.

The opening cutscene always fills me with so much nostalgia

Wow, Tale of the Dragon looks like a bad fan project from every angle. The units are cheap reskins of existing models, the voice acting is awful, and the story seems to be written by someone with only a basic knowledge of Chinese mythology. "Uhm, let's see... The balance of Yin and Yang is disturbed, leading to some vague disasters. There's gonna be dragons, magical birds, and a giant who magically fixes everything".

I used to watch my dad play this game on our family pc when I was a child. Eventually I began to play it, and continued to play it long after he stopped. I remember getting the Titans expansion for christmas one year even though my dad hated me playing games on the PC, however he knew that we both loved Age of Mythology. After he passed I found comfort and massive amounts of nastalgia in playing the game, even listening to the soundtrack. And after seeing the trailer for Age of Mythology Retold, it brought tears to my eyes as a game that both my father and I invested so much of our time into, is finally getting the light of day it deserves. And I know that when it comes out, my father will be sitting beside me watching me play it.

As a kid growing up on Portugal, in a time where the internet was a luxury, this was the game that taught me english. I still remember by heart a lot of full cutsenes. One of my favorite games of all time, for sure.

I always felt that China getting monks that convert is ridiculous. the only other way to convert a unit is an Atlantean god power and that only works twice if you pick that specific god. instead, the Chinese get a buildable unit that can do it as many times as they like for every god

A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.

I played this game so much when I was a kid. It was something else.
10:00 speaking of the voices, I was surprised to find out that they aren't speaking gyberish. Greeks and Atlanteans actually speak greek. The Egyptians and the Norse speak what the designers could find back in 2000's Internet in terms of what their languages were like in antiquity. Pretty nice dedication to such a minute detail

Fun fact: the Nintendo DS got a port of this game in the style of a turn based strategy game as a successor to the Age of Kings port to the DS, and I must say it is easily one of my favorite DS games ever created

I remember watching your Rome 2 videos all the way back in 2013 and it was my first exposure to in-depth game critique of its kind, and still inspires me to this day and led me to form my own critique of the Total War franchise. It's great to see the king return and I will always stop whatever I'm doing if Dr. Sane drops a video!

8:20 Fun fact, the ships were originally meant to be larger & function like the ships in Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War do where you determine a ship type by staffing it with land units. This was simplified in production into the ships we know today. During the campaign & in the editor you can access a second type of dockyard next to the normal docks, that additional dockyard is also a remnant of the older naval system that was aborted in production.

Holy shit this is like watching an old dead friend revive back to life after years of being gone. Glad to have you back sanity and I hope this means we can see more of your opinions on how the TW series is going and maybe check out other critiques on series by other TW youtubers like Legend, Volund, and Melkor. Would like if you could look at the Remaster and see how it could have done better but also on the parts it did great like the modding support.

Always love seeing people recognize the greatness of the game. Sound bites burned into your memory is quite right