| teigaga said: When has metacritic ever lied? |
For the average gamer, Metacritic honestly isn't all that inaccurate for many games. There are some genres where it falls short though. JRPGs noticeably tend to get lower scores for stupid reasons. I mean, rating a JRPG down because you had to grind? Dumb. Taking a huge chunk of points off because the English VA isn't magnificent, basically dinging the game because it doesn't have that AAA budget for VA casting, even if it includes dual audio? Super dumb. Removing points because the gameplay isn't fast enough or is too complicated? Incredibly dumb. It's like people make it a point to find reviewers that don't like JRPGs, lacking any actual understanding of the genre, then tell them to have at it, and then proceed to okay a review that takes off points because the JRPG is a JRPG. It would be like rating down a shooter because you shoot stuff, but you don't quite like how much you have to shoot stuff.
Of course, this is why I think the point system is flawed to begin with. People get too hung up on the basic number and won't read actual reviews. I wrote a whole piece about the validity of reviewer opinion for a site, and a major part of it was the fact that a number is ultimately the most vague, tiniest part of reviewer opinion. I may rate a game as 6.5, but that doesn't mean it is necessarily a bad game. That just means it's flawed, and if someone read my review, they may find they don't mind the flaws and want the game. That's great. I had somebody completely disagree with a 5.5 I gave, and I'm glad because that means they read my review and formed their own opinion. I want the content to tell the story, not the number. Unfortunately, many sites shoot for making it on Metacritic or Game Rankings, and thus, a number is seen as necessary, which just perpetuates a cycle of misunderstanding and a reliance on the worst way of figuring out a reviewer's actual thoughts on something. Then people insist reviewer opinion is broken and worthless because those dang numbers just don't line up perfectly with the personal preferences of everybody who may ever view them.
That said, if you're just looking for an incredibly vague opinion on whether reviewers generally think the experience is more or less flawed, Metacritic is a fairly accurate measure. After all, it's an average. It only makes sense if many of us fall in line with the average with some of us being outliers on either side of the average. In this case, the number tells you Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer definitely has issues, but in the long run, you may still enjoy it if the flaws don't bother you. It isn't in that beware number range, but rather, be cautious, read reviews, and figure out how bad the flaws really are towards your personal enjoyment.
See how I tied that back into the topic at the end? :p
