First of all, I'd like to apologize for not being a very active and positive member of the Hotline Miami community. I'm a simple person, when I saw that Hotline wiki was a trash heap in 2015, I wanted it changed for the better, and with the help of the people here, it was. If I'm inactive and caustic, that's just a product of the kind of laziness you pick up from writing about video games and the kind of defensiveness you pick up from trying to write well about video games.

I say all this because for as long as Hotline Miami has existed there has been a strata of completely useless writing on it. These are mostly in the form of positive retrospective videos that are well-meaning but very, very stupid. The kind of gamer Hotline Miami targets doesn't seem to have interest in making videos, and the task has fallen to a collection of video-makers who figure Hotline Miami is good enough fodder for their turbines to keep the YouTube cash cow or whatever they're chasing coming. That's not to say every video maker of Hotline Miami is a successful video maker, but rather that just about every video maker of Hotline Miami is a video maker first and a Hotline Miami enthusiast second.

There are exceptions to this. Over time Squatch Gaming Official put out some very good videos on Hotline Miami, and I consider his chronology of the series to be surprisingly valuable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWfa2ouQooI

This video is long enough to convey that it's just supposed to help literal players of the series put together things they may have missed about the story. It's not a perfect video, but it is knowingly imperfect, which is a good attribute to have as well.

The majority of videos on Hotline Miami I'd classify less as game supplements and more as pretentious circlejerks related to very little of the actual content at hand. Not all of these are necessarily that bad, either; strummerdood's How Hotline Miami 2 Makes Sense Out of Senseless Violence is a decent enough pretentious circlejerk for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwYkLu62deE

I'm with this video until it starts treating Videodrome as a punching bag and proceeds to draw references to Slaughterhouse Five to compensate. Videodrome is a very, very interesting movie that is directly the inspiration for the Hotline Miami post-level ambiance. It is a good topic for a video. Slaughterhouse Five is not an inspiration for HM and everything about its thematic reading in relation to Hotline is functionally worthless, hence the pretentious label I slapped this with.

You may have noticed something similar to what I'm talking about: a video about Hotline Miami is good, but then it stops being good. They say something incorrect or irrelevant and the masquerade ends: it was always a dumb video unconcerned with what Hotline Miami series actually was.

It's very difficult to put into words why Hotline Miami as a series is so valuable. It is actually very hard to verbalize. I'd say it's something of a cultural nexus and answer to a ton of huge media trends, be they interactive, passive, or musical. And the musical composition is the most overlooked topic to make Hotline Miami videos on. It is a very, very important trait of the games, but the ins and outs of how it works just never gets covered. Major Third has a very, very short video on HM1's (not HM2s as its from 2014) music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6OXY0StkCQ

To my knowledge there's not an equivalent video for HM2, which is a shame because its soundscape is much more matured and developed. There is another, longer video on HM1, however:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjsic8hiQ5k

I like this, it's about the mental state the man was in when he played HM and builds Russia nicely. It also completely ignores everything in Hotline Miami's soundtrack that isn't Miami Disco by Perturbator and is more about the movie influences of John Carpenter and Drive, which is also completely acceptable.

I guess what I'm trying to get out with all this is that there has never been a Hotline Miami thinkpiece or video that I've actually liked wholly. The illusion is always dropped at some point that the person isn't going to give HM its full due and won't actually talk about the documentary Cocaine Cowboys or its sequel Hustlin' With the Godmother, as any serious look into HM's development would have to do.