And I thought Gamespot's FE review was bad.

[Bodhesatva]

naznatips said:

Bodhesatva said:

I actually don't see a problem with this. People don't seem to cry foul when games are criticized for being too easy.

Difficulty isn't something like intellectual sophistication in a movie, where there is no limit to the amount that is good. You will never here a movie critic say that a film was too intelligent or that it was too emotionally complicated. That's something that has no limit; by contrast, everyone has a point where difficulty stops being a good thing.

Which certainly makes it more challenging to critique game difficulty; when is a game too easy? When it is too hard? What do those terms mean in the context of a professional critique? I'm not suggesting that 1up has correctly decided what is too difficult or too easy; I haven't played New Blood at all. Instead, I simply want to establish that the idea of a game being too difficult isn't an absurd complaint.

A game being too difficult could be a valid complaint, but lacking any content in your review past bitching about it being too difficult is not acceptible. They are reviewers, and it's their job to review all aspects of the game, and not to bitch about one aspect.

As far as that aspect being correct: To quote IGN when they were questioned about the 1UP reviewer's opinion in their podcast "There is no excuse at all for being unable to beat this game on easy mode, and while the normal difficulty is on the hard side for most people it's far from unbeatable." It seems to me that they are either very bad at games (which I doubt considering they are reviewers) or criticizing the game for being too hard in hard mode... which is ridiculous.

After 4 hours with the game I have progressed with difficulty on normal mode but I have completed every operation they complained about in the review (all of which were in the first hour or 2) with no difficulty, which of course leads me to believe that they didn't complete the game either, which is very unprofessional. Again, I really don't care what score you give a game, but the written content of the review needs to be detailed, concise, and informative.

I'm really not defending 1up's review here. Rather than an "I totally agree with 1up, and you guys are totally wrong" post, this was intended to be a more general "1up may not be wrong in this case, but complaints about a game's difficulty are not inherently and always wrong."

As others in the thread have pointed out, its possible to believe that games should neither be criticized for being too easy nor too hard, and I think that's a very reasonable position (I happen to agree with it). But if you are GOING to criticize games for being too easy at times, you must ALSO criticize games for being too hard at others. It's neither, or both.