The Guild

Every season of The Guild gets better, meaning that I would probably give Season 1 of the show a 7/10 while Season 6 deserves a 10/10. Why is this you may ask? They went from no budget, to fan donations, to being sponsored by Microsoft and are now sponsored by Google. What does this have to with the review. Well, the seasons of this show really reflect what budget it had at the time, the sets are often overused in the earlier seasons with very little music, wide shots or locations. The camera quality is especially low for the first few seasons but you will want to push through the first few seasons for the payoffs of character development you will get in the later characters.

I feel like some characters in the show are slightly are extremely unlikable to the point of cringe-worthy in the earlier seasons. Zaboo seems even creepier that I imagine Felicia wrote him to be, Bladezz comes off as as a painful representation of a foul mouthed and ignorant teenage gamer and don't get me started with Zaboo's mother. I feel like they should have either gone for a different casting for her role or changed the centre of the jokes, I mean a 20 year old still getting baths from his mom gets old fast.

Before you say, why 9/10 then. Why not average it out to an 8? Well simply put it is an unfair score for the greatness of Seasons 4-6, I mean there are still plenty of laughs in the first few seasons but S1-3 rely too heavily on the dialog and I found myself often finding other things to do while listening to the show more like a podcast than a webseries. In the later seasons they really get it, they finally find a good mix for Vork, who is the regimented rule following leader of The Guild, Bladezz is tolerable, Tink is cute and evil at the same time, Codex is still shy but now is willing to go out of her comfort zone and Clara is still as irresponsible as ever with her parenting but now you don't feel like reporting her to the police for poor parenting but she instead reminds you of those friends who have really bad parenting. The jokes in the later seasons are also less game centred and revolve more heavily around the gamers themselves making it easier for people who are not gamers to get involved in the series. As in S1 characters often talk about increased their DP and many other references that were difficult to understand unless you had played an MMO before.

In summary, great show. Funny characters, but at the end of the day it is a webseries so locations, actors and camera equipment is usually not as high as you would expect on a regular TV show. I still highly recommend it and would probably call it the best webseries currently in existence.