I think people need to play this game and get used to the controls and game mechanics before they can enjoy it, one reason I like it is because it has a little higher difficulty in the begining which is what I love about a lot of JP games in that they are actually harder, and if the control is really that bad, why am I now getting S rank on stages? =P

btw I don't know why this thread went to so many graphs lol, the point is this game isn't a 2/5 star game. The video I'm posting below is my second time on stage 1 after I beat the game once and I went from rank D to Rank A, I don't even know why they say it's so broken, you just have to learn the game. The graphics isn't bad either, it's just not the same as western games. Sorry about the quality though, it was recorded from a live stream.

Interesting.

Best post in the thread.

We have to worry about it because if a unjustified review causes low game sales there won't be more games like it. So here we are making a fuss about it regardless.

Xplay totally fails at justifying a lot of their scores, this is another one of the unjustified ones.

Read the text below the video. They explain pretty clearly why it got that score. As mentioned earlier in the thread, xplay only has 5 possible scores they can give out, so obviously it isn't going to align with other reviewers. Anyone calling bias on this needs to play the goddamn game first, along with the original tenchu games, and get back to us on how good it is.

Take a look at the graph I posted.  The trend lines for the X-Play stars converted to a 100 point score versus the Metacritic average for the same game follows the same general pattern.  Then take a closer look at the actual Metacritic score verus X-Play score.  Here is what you will notice.  For games rated 1-Star by X-Play, the Metacritic average ranges between 33 and 57 and averages about 45, so the games rated 1 star by X-Play will fall around 25 points below the Metacritic average.  Similarly the games rated 2 stars will fall around 16 points below Metacritc average.  Games rated 3 stars will be 7 points below Meacritic average.  Games rated 4 stars will be right at Metacritic average.  Games rated 5 stars will actually be about 10 points above the Metacritic average.  All of this is true regardless of the system the game is on.  In fact to most accurately convert the X-Play star rating to a Metacritic average, the following formula should be used.

Expected Metacritic Average = (X-Play Star Rating) x 11.25 + 33.75

The past six months were dominated by holiday 2008 releases.  XBox360, and PS3 actually released a lot of their main games during this timeframe, so those are the games that X-Play reviewed and gave them 3-5 stars in general.  Games in this range are expected to be scored right around the Metacritic average.  During this holiday season, almost no shovelware (1-2 star games) was released on the HD sytems, so there are no dots that fall way below Metacritic average.

The Wii release schedule during this timeframe was quite a bit different.  We got some high quality games which explains the upper group of dots, and then we got several shovelware releases which explains the lower group of dots.  I have never played Tenchu (and probably won't have time to play it ever), so I can't comment on how accurate the 2 star rating is by X-Play.  But realize that 2 star rating form X-Play represents an expected Metacritic average of 56 and not 40 as you are assuming.  This is exactly where Tenchu Z on the XBox360 is at right now.  If you think the Wii game is better than the XBox360 game and could be a Metacritic average 68 game, it should have had a 3 star rating from X-Play.  It's possible the game falls short of that mark and taking everyone else's opinion into account, the Metacritic score will settle around a 64.  In this case either a 2 or 3 star rating from X-Play is fully justifiable.  You can see bias where you want to.  I just see data and patterns.

You did understand that the number represents the difference between the XPlay score and the MetaCritic Average FOR THAT PARTICULAR GAME. There is not constant involved. This has nothing to do with high and low scoring games. They could give 4 stars on a game that had a MetaCritic average of 100 and they would be 20 points low even with a good score. If they gave 1 star to a game that had an average score of twenty that would plot as a zero (perfect match)

I understand what it means.  The constant that is involved is that all games that scored 5 stars on X-Play have differing Metacritic average scores for the same game.  The differences are true for all systems, and all games.  The fact is what X-Play calls a 5 star game  for this generation ends up being a game that ranges beween 80 and 98 on Metacritic, while a game called a 1 star game by X-Play ranges between 33 and 57 on Metacritic.  This happens to be pretty much true for all systems that I have looked at.  Therefore if all you knew was an X-Play Star rating of a game, you could come up with an expected Metacritic score with the formula I came up with (it does not correspond to 1 Star = 20 and 5 Stars = 100, it's more like 1 Star = 45, and 5 Stars = 90).  It's important to use the anticipated Metacritic score and not the raw star to score conversion, because if you do the latter, ALL 1-star game will be thought of as underrated by X-Play because nothing had a Metacritic average as low as 20, but since 1 Star = 45 on Metacritic, only those games that ended up between 45 and 57 were underrated by X-Play, while those between 33 and 45 were overrated by X-Play.  Since Tenchu on the Wii got 2 stars, we should expect it to end up at around 56 on Metacritic.  If it's actuallty higher, X-Play did not think of it as highly as other reviewers did.  We don't expect Tenchu to be a Metacrtic 40 game, because if it was, X-Play should have rated it 1 star and not 2.

We can also use my formula in reverse and anticipate a star rating for each game based what the Metacritc score was, and then compare the anticipated star rating to what X-Play actually gave the game.  I summed up the results for the latest games in the following table:

As can be seen, X-Play actually under-rated 4 games (Rygar, Mushroom Men, Tales, and yes Tenchu) , over-rated 3 games (Rayman, Skate It, and Animal Crossing) and did exactly what was anticipated for 2 games (Castlevania and Wii Music).  No game is off by more than 1 star rating.  There are several multiplatform games that X-Play rated on other platforms and not on Wii (e.g., Guitar Hero, Sonic Unleashed, COD: WaW, Rock Band 2), but that is quite understandable.  It's easy to cut and paste a review on a website, but if you do the same review twice on TV, ratings will go down.  Some of these were rated higher on the Wii and some lower.  There are some exclusive games X-Play never reviewed (ranging from SPray one of the worst to Strong Bad's Cool Game Episode 5 being one of the best).  All the games that X-Play did rate during this review period averaged about 65 on metacritic, while those that were not rated averaged about 68, so the over and under rating pattern is not likely to change if more data was available.  Show me the bias where X-Play rates games into two groups, with one being generous while other being dumped on.

I already did as far as I'm concerned but I've expended far more time than those particular pair deserve. For my money IGN is much more consistent and vitually never has reviews out in left field; so even though they are no particular fan of the Wii they are at least consistent.

Thanks for the discussion, I'll just agree to disagree.