Oh, the casualized gamer thing just dawned on me after reading your analyses. It's more Phil weaseltalk. He's lowkey acknowledging that since he himself has been picking and choosing only babymode games since at least November 2020, even exploiting adaptive difficulty in PvP games or flat out refusing to play ranked, choosing instead to dunk on scrub lobbies in the 30th anniversary SF collection, he's gotten used to playing on babymode and doesn't want anything else. He's "casualized", you see.
I've been saying this for a while, but coming off of months and months of super easy releases played only on normal or below, cheesed, read on guides and handheld through has finished dulling Phil's edge. This might be just him confirming the theory, or coming to terms with it on his own. He literally expects to just walk into every encounter in every game and win by mashing attack now. He's just stuck on "Chill N' Beg" mode and he can't get into gear again. With how lazy he's become, and how Phil at his very best only really ever amounted to a shitty flowcharter in a game that was already old as hell when he played it, I doubt he'll regain his skills. It's basically the Project 7 plot but for realsies.
The 10.000 hours theory holds very true in general, but of course 10.000 hours of playing Hello Kitty Online doesn't make you a master of games in general. Some skills do transfer between games, but Phil's best game is a 30 year old, extremely basic, tremendously broken title and the kicker is he himself doesn't even understand the basics of that one game. He frequently refers to "footsies" and "meaties" wrong, and he insists that he's got strong fundamentals in every fighting game thanks to his super turbo knowledge, when in reality he's a flowchart scrub in literally every fighting game he touches.
As for Divinity, he's undergeared and slightly underlevelled now, he's fucking himself over with gold gains and his weird newfound EW GURL COOTIES personality has fucked him out of access to the 2nd best character in the game, because she's edgy and has some obviously romantic scenes and all. I don't know if Ifan was also too sexy or too cool for him to take along, but that was also a terrible move. I'm behind on his footage, but honestly, 2 words tell you all you need to know if you're a fantasy nerd: Dwarf Ranger. Let's take this race that traditionally has never NOT been a sturdy frontline fighter or a surprisingly tanky wizard and make them a crit hit class with no inherent crit bonuses. Big ups.
At the pace he's going he'll have to admit defeat, restart the playthrough (Not happening) or just throw in some of the gift bag features that turn the game into Minecraft and just give you a way to grind gold, breaking the game completely. It would be basically cheating though, and given it's a viewer's choice, I don't think it would go over very well. Not that Phil would give a fuck, or that it would deter his whales, of course.
