| binary solo said: 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. |
I agree with your statements. I wasn't actually indicating whether there was or was not any bias, I was simply wondering how it would be possible to analyze whether or not there is any actual bias against Japanese games by Western critical outlets. And, as I said, it's really, really hard to actually evaluate whether such bias exists, since the only major review outlet in Japan is Famitsu, and I think most people agree that Famitsu by itself isn't exactly... well, for lack of a better word, unbiased. Maybe if there was a Japanese equivalent of Metacritic that was prominent, this could be easier.
I think, maybe, using Amazon review scores in Japan would be viable? Again, I would have to compile a really long list of data and put it into R, and I am really, really way too lazy to do any of that.
