The Escapist: Horrible Journalism

I had to post this because it pissed me off to no end.

You know why modern game journalism can't be taken seriously? BECAUSE OF CRAP LIKE THIS. Regardless of what the journalist's opinion of the game (s) he's talking about, until he reviews it he should simply report the news. To literally title the article "Type 0 is here to ruin your day" is not only biased, it's bad form through and through.

Now, I've stated my opinions on the Final Fantasy series before. The series hasn't gone ANYWHERE. The games are still great and fun RPGs. And Type-0 looks like the best one we've had in years. I can understand if the guy doesn't have the same opinion as me, but his job should be to keep these thoughts to himself unless he is actually reviewing the game. All he should be doing here is relaying some news.

So what's this guys beef? Apparently, the anime-styled characters don't go well with the gritiness of the trailer. Good grief. The journalism here is bad enough, but the guy is reporting his personal biases in a racist way as well. Great.

Game journalism is in a sad enough state as it is, and reporting news like this is one of the reasons why.

Game Informer WKC2 Review

I'm not the kind of person to get hung up over review scores. At least, not for the reasons most people would. If I'm looking forward to a game, no amount of bad press or word of mouth will prevent me from trying the game out for myself.

Recently, however, I have noticed a disturbing trend with modern video game reviews. Specifically, I have a problem with 'JRPG's getting noticeably lower scores than their western counterparts, for no genuine reason. People often say that JRPGs are stagnating, that they don't provide the innovation that WRPGs apparently provide (which simply isn't true, more on that some other time). However, there seems to be something uglier than that afoot- a simple refusal by so-called 'game journalists' to give these games a fair shot at all, only begrudgingly giving a good game a decent score (see Gametrailer's review of Disgaea 4 for an example), and jumping on the smallest possible flaw. These games are criticised unfairly, plain and simple. A recent example I found was Game Informer's review of White Knight Chronicles II, a PS3 exclusive RPG that came out last month. Now, the original White Knight Chronicles was an average-at-best affair, which was dissapointing coming from the great developer Level 5. I can safely say that White Knight II is a vast improvement on it's predecessor, and in a gaming generation that lacks too many great JRPGs, you can't go wrong with a game featuring a giant midieval robot. Game Informer isn't known for particularly great reviews, but their review of White Knight Chronicles 2 is such an unfair piece of writing, I feel it is worth discussing. I'm going to pick out some lines from the review, and say why I feel they are wrong.