Nonsense. Plenty of JRPGs communicate their stories without embarrassments of cutscenes. The biggest JRPG franchise in the world manages to pull it off with relatively few cutscenes.

oh? What about series like Pokemon? Or Final Fantasy VI and prior? Or Chrono Trigger? And other countless names...

You just described everything that's wrong with the reviewing culture in the video games industry. Look at film reviews, no one complains about the variety of reviews, scores and opinions. The games industry press is still seen as enthusiast press and generally unprofessional especially due to the fact that they all follow the same crowd and scoreline (among other reasons). Metacritic is seen as some holy grail of ratings and reviewers are seemingly under pressure to score in the range of 7-10. Over inflated review scores are far more unprofessional then actual critique.

Sorry, I forgot the story in Pokemon was amazing.

I was just speaking about reviews in general nowadays and not Runa's. For example. people were throwing 9s at Crysis 2, but I played that game on 360 and their a assloads of glicthes. Not enought to restart the game, but they happened often enough that it sure as hell shouldnt be getting a near perfect score. 

I feel that a 5 is a mediocre score.  6 is decent, 7 is good, 8 is great, 9 is excellent, and 10 is a masterpiece.  

on the flipside, 4 is poor, 3 is bad, 2 is horrible, 1 is atrocious, and 0 is unplayable.  

Pretty much in line with GamrReview's settings. 

Oh yea have to add as well that Edge gave it 5/10 and Joystiq gave it 3/5. So it has been getting some scores in the 50-60 range from big sites/mags. Joystiq have a lot of similar issues too. Chocolina, music (god it's awful), bad dialogue and writing, nonsensical plot.

oniyide I played Crysis 2 and I would say 9/10 is fair. I didn't encounter any big glitches at all some miniscule things like throwing barrels and it getting stuck because of the physics etc.  9/10 is pretty reasonable for a game with great graphics, gameplay, length etc that just has a few small glitches. I think it only becomes an issue when you have games like Fallout 3 that have constant crashes, game breakings glitches etc.

There are a lot of odd things in the games reviewing industry though. I have been trying out Skyrim and for the life of me I can't understand why it gets the scores it does. It's this huge world but the conversation system is so poor and the combat so awful that it's a huge world of no fun for me. Gabe at PA said it very well when he said about going into a cave full of vampires instead of being an exciting thing it's just like ''Oh great I have to fight them, what a chore''. I'm still baffled at how Skyrim has the combat it does when Dark Messiah Of Might and Magic on PC did the same style of combat so incredibly well. Good melee combat with blocks, counters etc and then very cool magic use. Cast an ice spell on the foor and enemies would slip on the ice, leaving them vulnerable etc. It seems I'm in the minority as people love skyrim but I just can't wrap my head around what they are enjoying.

Outside of perhaps Chocolina, and the two crappy songs by everyones favorite Nobuo. I don't understand the complaints. I understood the "nonsensical" story, and found it to be very enjoyable.

Tbh have played through this game and actually very far in I don't really dispute the review, the game is a very mixed bag, the are some improvements in some areas while others fall below what even XIII brought. An example is the game has more replay value even though shorter but the plot descends into wtf type madness and is the definition of losing the plot, character growth is watered down and the dialogue well I'll just say it could use some work.

Which is cool, and further proves we all have our tastes.  

But my experience with the game was horrible.  Gameplay wise the entire second half was basically a joke, requiring almost no interaction and it was so dull my eyes would occasionally glaze over.  I cannot give a game like that a good score, it would be horribly dishonest.  

As for the plot, well I thought it was decent but like XIII, very poorly executed.  you shouldn't require a swath of datalogs just to understand how what you just did linked to the mythology of the world.  Also, my biggest issue (which I couldn't discuss in the review thanks to spoilers) was the enemy's motivations.  Caius's motivations and plans were so nonsensical and narrowminded that it took what could have been an engaging, time-spanning epic into a cheesy soap opera.  The characters which the story revolved took the promised epic scope and made it a high school drama.  that would have been fun if the characters were interesting (Noel was the only remotely relateable character).  

I loved how open it was, but it was so repetitive, the battles were tedious, the puzzles were more about patience than thought, the story was dwarfed from what it could have been.  I just...if I factored all that in and still gave it a good review, that would be horribly dishonest of me.