| Barozi said: Problem is that everyone has a different defintion of what a review should actually do or rather what the reviewer should write about. To me, a review is more than just one man's opinion. If it was, I wouldn't care one bit because we all know what a weird place the internet and its inhabitants is. (Not claiming that print reviews are different to online ones). A review should inform people and judge its content in the most objective way possible and furthermore compare it to other games in an appropriate way (Comparing gameplay to other games in the same genre, graphics to other games on the same platform, etc.). If you're supposed to write a review and dislike the whole genre or franchise, either skip it completely or rate it higher than what you actually think (because your own taste is in this case certainly not objective at all). If you're a fan, don't give everything automatically a 9.0 etc. Now this review is marked as being the "official VGC review". I'd agree that something like an average out of ... 3-5 or so staff members would definitely make it more official. However that means that the "main" reviewer would need to change parts of his review to give the correct impression of the score. And on the other hand it would certainly need more time to publish them when 5 members need to finish a game first (probably not enough review copies anyway, etc.) Just saying that the VGC GOTY awards aren't made up by one writer either but being a product of a number of staff members. |
GotY is done as a group, but reviews were never meant to be that way. In the end the person who attaches their name to the piece has to agree with the score. I personally approve most any score that goes through the reviews on our site and while I do feel it's ok to be closer to the meta score on most games it's much more important that the scores match the text, and I think this review did that.
The Process goes like this: After reading a few other reviews and making sure there isn't any objective fact in Runa's review that is contradicted by a different writer to check the content rhe review scores are looked over to make sure that he isn't being overly nice or harsh based on what is written in the review and that he roughly remains consistent with how other jrpgs have been scored (again based on the text). If all that matches up then it's approved and Craig looks over the spelling and grammar editing.
Having all the reviewers agree on something is nice, but what's the point of having more than one review site if they all say basically the same thing? I much prefer to have variety out there so people can read a couple different views on a game and get an idea of not only what they might love about it, but also what they might dislike.
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