>>15612176
>I missed so many games back in the day for having universally shit reviews, I'm kinda mad.
In a way, I'm glad I didn't have access to that many games growing up, and because reading about can't-haves would have just been taunting at that point, never had magazine subscriptions, or frequented major vidya outlets. Aside from serebii (Pokemon being one of the few series I did have at the time), finding my way onto imageboards in 2006 or so, coinciding with more of an interest in games on account of a friend I'd made around then, /v/ quickly became my main place to lurk for shit about vidya, and a lesson to be learned real quick was that "professional" reviewers were laughably awful, and it's only gotten worse as time has gone on. Hell, sometimes in researching something I'll come across some shit that strikes me as just utter shittery, like an outlet not giving a good game much coverage at all on the assumption that no one that no one that read their stuff was apt to care about it in the first place (and gee, when people hardly know it exists, surprise, it flops), or an import review deeming "no space on western shelves for this; we've got Final Fantasy to play" for a game most likely preventing not only it, but two more subsequent entries coming west until the PS3, and then that one we did get was shat on by journos so fucking badly we didn't even get all the content. It makes one wonder if they had a goal in being destructive towards the library we do see and what is considered good therein (be it paid shilling for/against, or gatekeeping), or if it's simply companies listening to reviews of niche shit aimed towards a normalfag audience.
>>15612137
Was considering reading through some "professional" critics that gave one of my favorites a 50/100 and 55/100 respectively, but then I realized the former sounds like some commie shithole site going from the name, and the latter being IGN being IGN. On a related note, how in the fuck is there a "professional" (at least by metacritic standards) outlet called "Four Fat Chicks", and why on earth would they have given that particular game a perfect 100? I'm sickened by the name and curious about the rationale given some of the content in the game, but have to question if they're not there to throw a seed of doubt into people looking to see if the game's actually good (it is, but I'd call it more an 8-8.5/10 if I had to). Not willing to go brave that apparent landwhale den though to find out.
Oh, and I do have to wonder though: were the reviewers there for Explorers of Sky looking at it as it's own stand-alone game, or had they reviewed Time and Darkness first and were more looking for what merit it had over the originals? Also IGN gonna IGN, be it aiming reviews at their normalfag audience that while they might like Pokemon aren't as apt to enjoy mystery dungeon gameplay and coloring the rating through that mindset, or maybe they just tossed the review task to someone that doesn't like that sort of game anyhow. I remember their Ghost Trick review complaining that the game was "too wordy for me" tier as an obligatory downside, as if the sort of people that enjoy Ace Attorney and other mixed story/puzzle games would be put off by that fact. But I would assume that the normalfagbase that considers their word reliable sure might agree.