Gaming journalism is somehow even worse than sports journalism and has been for a long time. The saying that "You can't spell ignorance without IGN" has been around for at least 15 years now, maybe even two decades. And we all know there are many reasons for that.
It's also nigh-impossible to be taken seriously, as most of it is seen as bought-out and extremely shallow.
Same deal as reviews while I'm at it.
This is a terrible take tbh but it's a very common one because few in the gaming space actually seem to understand the role of game journalism and have any media literacy when it comes to things like reviews.
I remember when Xenoblade fans were shitting on IGN because their Xenoblade DE review had a slightly lower score than the original, and the video for the review had someone mispronouncing the names.
So they said the reviewer clearly didn't even play it, or even any game in the series. This is despite the guy who wrote it (named Travis) constantly referred to the original title throughout practically the entire review. And it's pretty known if you look through that he is a big fan of Xenoblade, his specialty is RPGs in the first place.
Then people shit on a discrepancy which is that despite Travis the Xenoblade DE reviewer saying it's the best version of the game, the 3DS version had a better score (8.7) and the original had the best (9/10). This is easily explained by the fact that all of these were written by different people over the course of a decade and with different expectations in mind:
Now let's do something that nobody in any game review discourse ever does: read the fucking reviews.
Let's evaluates some context for the reviews. The first one is inherently going to have the most gravitas going towards it; Xenoblade Chronicles is a massive, singleplayer MMORPG odyssey essentially, and they somehow fit it onto the Wii. Not only that, but this game actually had other reasons for hype at the time: Xenoblade Chronicles almost never came to America, and its releasing here took a fan effort (
At the time, Reggie and Nintendo of America was infamous for not believing in their market's ability to accept these types of titles, and skipped out on many titles. Some still didn't make it. This is in spite of these all having English localizations already, having come to English-speaking European countries.
Next up, when we read the blurb under the Review title, we get another tidbit into the minds of the reviewers:
One of the Wii's first and last epic JRPGs is the best thing to emerge from this troubled genre in the past five years.
This is because, at the time, JRPGs were in a bit of a slump. Final Fantasy was in a dark place, Dragon Quest entered the era where it took a while to get new entries, Monster Hunter wasn't nearly as big outside of Japan. Pokemon wasn't largely seen as a "JRPG" to a lot of people, Persona hadn't popped off with Persona 5 yet (though it was definitely a known quantity, and this was the year of Persona 4: Golden.)
All that to say, JRPGs had, in fact, been in a it of a slump, and the reviewer clearly is going into it with it being an exception to a general rule. This will, of course, naturally impact their perception of the title's quality. So we're essentially combining several Wow-Factors on top here, just from a bit of videogame history knowledge and reading three lines of the article.
-Getting a game like this on the Wii was insane.
-JRPGs were in a bit of a slump.
Now, let's continue onto the "thesis" of this review.
The writer is establishing the tone here quite clearly, Xenoblade Chronicles is, to their view, a special game within the genre. What I care more about, however, is the retrospective perspective- some of the things written here as points in Xenoblade's uniqueness is actually really common now, and if anything that's already becoming "counter-cultured" within the genre.
Xenoblade Chronicles is, again, kind of a singleplayer MMO RPG, and that is mentioned here with the side quests. You can go around the world and grab quests from NPCs, go and fight monsters off the beaten path and find goodies, and increase reputation, get new armor, etc. MMO shit. This was not as common back then, and it's also something that many modern RPGs are back-lashing towards, and a few years ago people kind of started getting sick of.
Nowadays most things like this would be considered "padding", and in my opinion, for good reason. An excuse to force you to do a lot more shit to get little, all for that 100%. In fact, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, two years after DE, changed the systems a lot. These sort of fetch quests and reputation with settlements still exists, but it's all passive and you can do it by just going to a menu from anywhere in the world and clicking A like three times to finish the quest.
Most of the other quests are instead mini-questlines with optional characters that add depth to the world, and are often (almost) main quest level events. So they've eased back on this sort of thing over time, and for good reason, this kind of thing blows. Persona 5 blowing up was a big push for RPGs to, rather than throw in this kind of padding, try to use side characters as a way to associate side content that fleshes out the world positively. Every Xenoblade game had Heart-to-Hearts where characters in the party talk to each other optionally, usually without a quest, and Xenoblade 3 got rid of it for that kind of approach.
Moving on,
Also worth noting that the culture around this type of game element, random shit all over the world, is kind of hitting its own counter-culture. You don't have to go far to hear "I'm sick of exploring an empty plane to pick up fifteen Scrimblos so I can make one thing I care about." In the years between the original and the remake, sprawling worlds full of materials are everywhere, and people are kind of sick of it. This is the kind of thing that makes games age no matter how new they are, or even irrespective of the graphics. Evolution of game design.
Skipping ahead some irrelevant stuff for this essay,
For anyone who hasn't seen it, it really isn't that stylish compared to most things today. And if I were to review Xenoblade DE, something like how that barely looks better in the newer version is in fact something that'd stick in my mind for a $60 Remake.
More mention of disappointment with RPGs before this game in the last 5 years.
And active disappointment with RPGs of the time, and how Xenoblade isn't like that. Even going as far as to say "this struggling genre". The linearity of Final Fantasy XIII made it a clear punching bag for a lot of the industry (and a lot of the players) back then, so it's not too surprising to see it mentioned negatively. There is however a growing number of people who like the game.
And that ends this -'ridin sesh from this author. Now let's talk about the 3-ish years between this game and the 3DS port. So far, we had zero real sequels between Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles 3D as Xenoblade Chronicles X, the only pre-Switch one, was still not out yet. Notably, the 3DS game had its own wow-factor, being that now it's running on a fucking 3DS.
Notably, Monolith Soft actually weren't the main developers on this port, and that port team is Monster Games. Anywho, Xenoblade 3D was a very low-scale project that really was just porting it to the New 3DS, with few extras, mainly a way to listen to the music any time you'd like.
This is a very short review, but the reviewer (Jose, different person) gives it a lower score than the original for a very clear reason.
The port is still given its flowers for still basically being the full package,
but this is a port of a 3 year old game for full-price on a system that, to be clear, you had to buy the New version to even play it. 8.7/10 seems fine to me, a lower score for a good port that could've been polished more, but overall about the same thing.
Then we get to the review that really, truly grinded people's gears:
By Travis, the review starts with a recap on how the game has never truly had a good shot with its ports before, coming on low-spec consoles. After that, we get a paragraph about actually one of the more hit/miss changes with the remake, and one that the reviewer is mostly positive on.
Now I want to give a little spiel about this, I don't agree with this reviewer, I am one of the people where the game's new artstyle is absolutely a "miss". Now, to be clear, Xenoblade Chronicles DE absolutely is better on a technical level in every way, and many blurry points before now look perfectly fine. But what I actually prefer in the original is the less generically "anime" artstyle:
It's best shown with these portraits which are used in the battle UI in my opinion, because here we can remove the "bias" I guess you could say with low-poly Shulk versus high-poly Shulk. In my opinion, this loses a lot of the charm especially for a war-torn world that wasn't really built from the ground-up for this artstyle.
Next I want to point out that the beginning of the
third fucking paragraph instantly mentions that the reviewer played the game around a decade ago.
You could maybe argue this is ambiguous, but "right back" to me is pretty clear, and we get like fifteen statements like this. Anywho, in the next paragraph we instantly find one of those clashes from eight years apart + different reviewers!
While both this and the original review are positive on the story, they have completely different takes on what the story
actually is. The original review praised Xenoblade for having "none of the pompousness and melodrama of less accomplished Japanese epics," and some other comments on the writing that I didn't nitpick earlier.
I'd say that this and "dialogue laughably over-written" are, while not complete contradictions, different views on something over many years. And within the Xenoblade community to begin with, lots of dialogue from the games is entirely memed for its self-seriousness, lines being repeated, etc.
The DE remake reviewer does praise the character writing, and that's not a contradiction. The characters don't need to be believable to be fun to read, but I'd kind of agree with Travis who makes consistent mention that the game's writing gets wonky, it
does take itself too seriously (and that's charming), it
is melodramatic and more.
The DE reviewer finds great annoyance with the constant talking though, while the original reviewer
sees it as defying their expectations of what they view RPG characters as being like at the time. The DE reviewer goes on to talk about gameplay improvements, and lack of improvements, mentioning a few QoL bits for the UI such as actual health bars and indicators for the player to know their positioning will get them bonuses. But then they go onto say that there isn't much changed:
This is really getting at the meat-and-potatoes on how a game that the reviewer says is "the best version" could get a lower review than the previous two- "Wii-era RPG design". Game reviewers tend to have different opinions on this kind of thing. Should remasters be judged as if they came out today, should it be about improvements to the original, or some other nebulous things?
Personally, I am of the opinion that if a remaster costs $60 it should come at the quality of a $60 game, and I get the vibe that's how this reviewer kind of feels as well. Beyond that, we see that in the last eight years of design change, fucking around in the kinda-boring-overworld and fighting/collecting things over and over has become a tedious negative.
The reviewer does praise the change to menuing, which is good, but this is still a compliment sandwich where clearly the fillings grinded the writer's gears the most. They do this again, writing a paragraph about how combat is still great with switching between characters,
we get this. Then we get a full paragraph about how the OST is incredible, of course.
So the reviewer gives it an 8/10, and its verdict makes it pretty clear. Despite how the game is finally on hardware where the game can truly be free, it's been eight years and shit has changed. Now, where does this all lead? Should be clear that the controversy over this review is pretty silly and that if you think about the reviews all of it makes sense.
They reviewed it as a $60 product in 2020 rather than an incremental rerelease from 2012 that just needed to be it again. And I think that's fine if not good. But you wanna know why I spend all this time defending reviews? Because this is the type of review that is actually good. The perspective of a critical veteran to the series is something that is highly vital to a review in my opinion, and this kind of thing really is a time capsule into both worlds of what happened between releases.
This is a good review that was recorded into a video by someone who hadn't played it. Who cares. Well, people don't think about it this way because we are so used to Youtube Essayist shitters who do everything and have a "persona". People see journalist organizations as just an organization rather than a group of people, which is part of the problem with media literacy on these topics in general.
People have also become used to fishing for "hypocrisy" which you can use to make any review from a company that has existed as long as IGN look silly. This company has had hundreds of people make reviews for them in the past with the control to write review scores, and people act like it should still be a leaderboard or some shit. "If a 7.5/10 today is a game better than a 8/10 from some random writer making a review for a game in 2014 with different expectations, IGN is entirely ridiculous".
I mean, almost every example of IGN reviews being dumb are just not accepting opinions, expecting complete "consistency" (whatever that's supposed to be, reviews should be personal as they are), or just making up a narrative. I mean I get it too, being a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon fan. Look at this:
From paragraph one we already can tell this reviewer really doesn't give a shit about the game.
Like, this guy really hates this game series and thinks it's really not fun, it's pointless, hates the plot (which most people like), etc.
And like, alright. This review kinda sucks, right? Like, it's so dripping with bias that it's hard to take everything at face value.
Which is a fucking good thing. A review is a personal account, not a fucking Wikipedia page.
If I wanted a neutral, dryly-written tale on each element of the game I'd have so many fucking ways outside of a review. This is what reviews are for, bluntly, in the most crude way! I absolutely detest this reviewer's opinion, and don't even think this is a "good review", but it's not a
bad one. It's an honest one.
If you care about graphics like it not looking like a GBA game? He's got you covered, telling you it looks like that and he dislikes it. Bought the last game and was hoping for massive improvements? He doesn't see many, and he covers that. And frankly, you can make a good argument that the gameplay is "dated". Go to any r/mysterydungeon random user and you'll find that like 50% of PMD fans think the gameplay is fucking mid anyways. The only thing I'll say is there is one bit of actual misinformation which is that Vulpix is also a playable character now, but also whatever sure. The tone this guy has would piss me off I was like 14, but I understand that if you are like 30 and your company tells you to go from probably playing some AAA titles to this you'd probably also be like this:
Which is also, unironically, laughably really fucking funny and so true. I mean people talk up the "difficulty" of these games, but I ran this game with partner Eevee (shocking??!?!?!) and a mid ass starter several times and yeah this game definitely plays the same. And a critique on needing to read a FAQ to get your starter is really fucking funny to me right now, and has always been true - and later games changed this for good reason. Bro also knows about the fury culture with the Phanpy line too LOL.
He also gives some credit which I think is fair:
Yeah I agree that Special Episodes feel a bit weird, some of the early ones kinda suck, and that the later ones are better. I also agree that frankly the better ones would be better tied into the main story more. This is real critique that I actually rarely see from PMD fans despite this being part of why I rarely touch the Special Episodes myself.
So, Mr. Jack from IGN in 2008, fuck you. But also like, the review isn't
bad. It's just not something I agree with. And that's the mindset I think people should have more with reviews.
People shit on IGN if they step out of line, or if they keep in line, it honestly doesn't matter. Give every AAA game an 8/10 because they're genuinely mostly fine? IGN sucks. Give Pokemon a 7.8/10 and mention a genuine flaw with the region for a full-price title? Also fuck you, get memed
for a decade.
It's not just IGN, of course. I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 was dropping and GameSpot reviewer got the PS4 copy, and gave a pretty negative review.
So here we have a
7/10 given to Cyberpunk 2077, a game that these people hadn't played yet because it wasn't out, and all the replies are fucking wilding out about how this is hypocritical for Skyrim, this reviewer is clearly just woke, "That's the person who did the 7.8/10!", "She's just an offended woman!", etc.
And of course, we all know how this turned out. Someone tried to tread the middleground of not being completely harsh without a day one patch and also reviewing what they were given, and they got harassed to no end by
people who hadn't played the game yet.
This is gaming journalism almost working but the people lash out so hard that it fails. Game journalism is important but chuds and frankly just gamers in general actually hate journalism. It tells them games they haven't played aren't as good as they like, or games they don't like are better than they thought, and it's people rather than an AI generated review score on a mental leaderboard of titles.
I don't think I know a single person who hates gaming journalism who actually lacks brainrot about it because there isn't really a reason to hate it as a whole. This whole post has been mainly focused on reviews, since that gets the most talked about, but then you have people like Jason Schreier who is publishing books on Blizzard projects that we will never see the day of, how gaming journalists talk to whistleblowers on crunch, layoffs, and more.
Rock Paper Shotgun, for instance, is an outlet mainly focused on the industry at large and has an entire page dedicated to all the stories of layoffs, which is really important and a way we get people like Geoff Keighley to finally acknowledge the situation. But notably, this also means that people had to write all of these, too.
Gaming journalism is important because the industry is important and having a variety of opinions is important, especially from people who are actually going to play thousands of games. A lot of reviews I see that fans of one series dislike will read like "This game is fine but it's not too special" because they've played many games like it at the same or greater scale, and that's why when games like Astro Bot, Balatro, Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 sweep awards and get mass critical acclaim it's very clear from the get-go. When even the people who've played the biggest games back-to-back-to-back are able to articulate how a game like Breath of the Wild is truly different, that's how we get games like Ocarina of Time standing the test of time on Metacritic.
