Devil's Third Review Thread - Metascore 40 (17 Reviews)

[binary solo]

patronmacabre said:

binary solo said:

Bloodborne (the souls series in general) is a Japanese game...just sayin'.

Is there actually any real evidence for this bias? There are a great many Japanese games that get well reviewed. And there are plenty of western games that get bad reviews. Do some analysis and present some facts if you're going to make this sort of claim.

I think the perceptions of bias comes in with smaller Japanese games like Disgaea, Atelier, Dangan Ronpa, non-Persona SMT, and Hyperdimension Neptunia which don't score particularly phenomenally, despite them having fairly dedicated fanbases in the west. The larger games like MGS, Final Fantasy, and mainstay Nintendo get reviewed much the same way major Western games would.

Really, of the smaller Japanese games, only Soulsborne, Persona, and Xenoblade (off the top of my head. I am sure there are others) have gotten extremely strong critical reception in the west.

Ultimately, I am not sure if there is or isn't a bias against Japanese games. I would have to do a fairly extensive statistical analysis. And I am kind of unsure how I would test it. Perhaps comparing Metacritic critical scores to user scores? But even that seems extremely problematic.

Demon's Souls was a totally new, small game coming from Japan, and it won Gamespot's GOTY award.

No, if the accusation of bias is against Japanese games then the comparison is with metascores of non-Japanese games. Probably best arranged by genre.

Disgaea's average metascore is in the 80's. Not sure how anyone can accuse metacritic counted reviewers of an anti-Japan bias and include Disgaea in the list. 7/11 Disgaea games with metascores are 80+. If people are ready to accuse reviewers of anti-Japan bias because games are scoring in the high 70's, like Catherine (meta score of 79 on PS3, 82 on 360) then I think there is something deranged about about the thinking of those making the accusation of what constitutes a good review score.

Oh yeah, and MGSV has a 95. That's a Japanese game.

If there's a bias, then it is a natural bias relating to tastes and preferences, not some systematic plan to degrade Japanese games. We only need to look at the best selling games in the west vs the best selling games in Japan and Mario aside there are absolutely diffeence in taste and preference between western gamers and japanese gamers. And this difference should naturally be reflected in Western reviewers, they are, after all, people who should generally be expected to roughly mirror the tastes and preferences of the culture from which the come. The question of whether Metacritic should incorporate Japanese reviews is a different matter, and perhaps metacritic should, but I doubt it would have much influence on metascores really. It's not like counting the Famitsu score for Devil's Third would turn it from a 40 to a 70. It would turn it from a 40 to a 42. Still a crap metascore.