Which Team Fortress 2 “Meet The Team” Short Video Is Best?

Team Fortress 2 is the granddaddy of class-based shooters. It’s over a decade old and still sees dedicated players returning to its servers on a regular basis. A key cause of Team Fortress 2‘s long-term success is the strength of its classes’ personalities, immortalized and characterized in the iconic series of “Meet the Team” short videos.

Every one of TF2‘s “Meet the Team” shorts are good, but the best excel at three crucial things: characterizing one or more team members, showing off that team member’s in-game mechanics, and telling a compelling story. All of them do these to some degree, hence why all of them are entertaining, but the upper echelon does it better than the rest. Ideally, the best “Meet The Team” videos also provide extra context to the TF2 source material but don’t require any prior context to be understood. They should be able to stand on their own merits as short films. If viewers need to actually play Team Fortress 2 to understand a short, then it’s not the best.

Looking at every “Meet the Team” short on the Team Fortress YouTube channel, it’s plain to see every one of them is witty and intriguing in its own right. Still, the majority of them are fairly straightforward vignettes, simply highlighting a class and its personality. They all do a good job at this, but there’s not much of a narrative to be found in most of them. Even bonafide memes like “Meet the Heavy” focus more on characterization than anything else.

A side effect of this is that most of these TF2 shorts focus on a single class instead of how all the characters interact with each other. This may seem like an unnecessary approach to take when the video is supposed to be about a single class, but having that class interact with other characters provides a lot more information about the game and its world than if the character is just by itself. As a result, most “Meet the Team” videos fail to stand on their own merits, since the viewer receives less context and has to consume more media from the franchise to fill in the blanks.

Why “Meet the Spy” Trumps Other TF2 Shorts

The better “Meet the Team” videos, like “Meet the Medic,” remedy this by adopting a narrative structure. These videos display a new level of charisma and chemistry, as viewers can see how the classes interact with each other, both in mechanics and in personality. Medic and Heavy, for instance, share a Tank-Healer relationship that is critically important to the strategic side of TF2. Meanwhile, the two TF2 classes also share a sense of humor and trade jokes to reinforce the idea that these two characters are friends who should be paired together.

However, the best of any “Meet the Team” video has to be “Meet the Spy.” It does everything the other videos do, but better. Just as “Meet the Medic” tells a story about triumphantly beating the odds, “Meet the Spy” tells a thrilling whodunnit mystery that uses the interactions between almost every class in TF2 to provide extra context for the game, without the viewer needing to do any guesswork. The short even manages to set up a goal consistent with one of TF2‘s most iconic game modes. Meanwhile, it also shows off the Spy’s gameplay mechanics as he systematically assassinates members of the enemy team on his way to capture their intel.

Unlike its companions, “Meet the Spy” manages to characterize Team Fortress 2 as a whole, rather than just one of its characters. By the end of the short, viewers know more about the game than they would from watching every other “Meet the Team” video back to back. They know everything from the game’s main objective to how multiple TF2 classes behave and function. At the same time, it tells a hilarious, compelling mystery about a suave secret agent infiltrating enemy territory. Most other “Meet the Team” videos do neither of these things. So, as funny and entertaining as its siblings are, none of them can hold a candle to “Meet the Spy.”

About The Author

Jonah Schuhart
(148 Articles Published)

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Jonah Schuhart is a Freelance Writer at Screen Rant. Growing up as the stereotypical gamer, Jonah absorbed everything he could about his favorite video games until adulthood came knocking. He decided to become a games journalist after his dad purchased a subscription to Gameinformer when he was 10 years old. Now, he follows in the footsteps of his early influences, giving his two-cents on the games he loves.

You can also find Jonah on Looper, where he writes about his favorite TV and Movies. Follow him on Twitter @JonahSchuhart, or reach him by email at [email protected]

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