1UP reviews Persona 4

[ZenfoldorVGI]

darthdevidem01 said:
Its funny how people keep saying "western reviewers give BAD reviews to JRPG/SRPG's" (IU, TOV, TLR) yet then Valkyria Chornicles n PErsona 4 manage to get brilliant reviews....

 

They give traditional jrpgs bad scores. Games we've seen a million times, and they have nothing new, but they've refined the old.

Both VC and P4 have some innovation and a fair bit of hype going into them, so they're looked at harder.

IGN gave Disgaea 3 a 6.7 out of 10.

The truth of the matter is that ToV and D3, along with the equally poor reviewed Radiant Dawn have been 3 of my favorite games this generation. Everyone who plays those games, love them. They are a traditional experience that many of us crave, and they are very well done.

Reviewers don't like traditional experiences. They've played those games a million times.

It's not that ToV is a bad game in reviewers eyes(most of them raved about it), it's just that the ideology around the game is different.

Instead of creating a new game, it rerolls an old game, and updates a few things. ToV is a very similar game to the equally excellent ToS, with upgraded graphics, different story and characters, and similar battle engine. The game is still excellent, it's just redundant.

In other words, the games are judged by being too similar to games before them. If Persona 3 and ToV(I've fully enjoyed both) were the only 2 jrpgs that ever existed, I'd be willing to bet that ToV would probably score higher and be enjoyed more.

The thing is, there have been a million similar games to ToV, that came before it. There have been relatively very few games similar to Persona 3 that came before it.

 

It's why we dont' give madden 10 every year, even though it improves. We're not reviewing games on their own merits, we're reviewing games based on our complete knowledge of the industry and that includes similar games that came before it.

Gears 2 would be the best shooter ever if Gears 1 didn't exist, because we shouldn't have been eased into excellence, we would have had it thrown on us all at once.

 

In that vein, games that are completely new and innovative are often over-rated for those same reasons. LBP was a fun game, but it certainly wasn't better than MGS4. Reviewers, however, had seen Metal Gear before. They'd never seen anything like LBP.

The exceptions to this rule tend to be very hyped games, which don't follow that logic. Halo 3, for instance, was only marginally better than Halo 3, and worse than Halo 1. However, it scored higher because of hype, and is a stain on review scores in most eyes. We criticize Famitsu for scoring games for fans, but we score games for hype, which is worse.