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MTZehvor on 19 August 2016
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Vodacixi said:
MTZehvor said:

Careful that you don't track too much straw in on the floor when you're done responding.

The point is not that critics don't feel hate. The point is that critics are, broadly speaking, a pretty wide and diverse group of reviewers; some of them will have attachment to the Metroid series, and some won't. This is especially the case with smaller review sites, where there will often be a few reviewers who are assigned games based on free time (Rev3 Games being one such example). The hate excuse falls flat because a sizeable portion of any group of critics will inevitably just not care that much about Metroid as a whole. If they don't care that much about Metroid, then they're not going to feel hate towards a spin off title for taking the series in a different direction.

The larger point here is that we've ended up with a diverse group of opinions; some Metroid fans, some not, and the general consensus seems to be that the game is pretty mediocre. Think of it like using a random sample to tease out extraneous factors; if a wide group of people with different backgrounds say that something is mediocre, then the chances of there being some outside force that's influencing the majority of their opinions is pretty small.

Except that if you read the mixed reviews or the bad ones you actually see that they complain about Federation Force not being a true Metroid game. Maybe it's not hate, maybe it's just that, as I said, they wanted the game to be bad from the beginning because that was the popular trend and that affected the scores of some sites. Because if you read the majority of mixed reviews they basically say: "Yeah, the game is ok... but is not a Metroid game. And that's bad".

I'm assuming this is largely in reference to the Nintendo Enthusiast 45/100 review, because I haven't seen any other reviews make reference to it as an issue outside of a passing statement basically saying "don't come into this expecting a Metroid Prime exploration like experience, because it's not." As for that particular review, I'm not going to defend it, but I don't think one particular review represents a trend that means every less than positive review is just filled with bias. Pretty much every review in the yellow category on MC has fairly clearly laid out reasons for why they didn't like it as much, ranging from the level design being simplistic, to the enemies being bullet sponges, to a lack of variety, etc.

Now, are these well thought out reasons for disliking the game, or do these fall more in line with the now infamous "too much water?" Can't say right off the bat. For the moment, though, I think we should give the criticisms the benefit of the doubt until we've finished the games ourselves, and then we can have a discussion on how everyone has their opinions obscured by disdain for the unfamiliar.