Topic: Most Controversial NintendoLife review?

Although there are many exceptions for specific games, on average I tend to think NintendoLife (and most professional game site reviewers) tend to score a little bit too high — 5 means average, 7 means good, 9 means excellent. There are plenty of games that are good without being one of the best most amazing games which was ever made.

Note that user scores, although a bit random because they include people scoring both way too high and way too low, tend to average lower than NintendoLife reviews and also lower than e.g. metacritic professional-reviews average.

That said, Crash trilogy is an exception to the rule where the user score is 7.8, higher than NintendoLife's score of 7. So their score may have been a bit low in this particular case.

As an aside, the gaming magazine I read as a kid had multiple reviewers and scores for the main games of the month, with a (I think) agreed score given overall.
Of course, some games are universally praised or buried, but it did give rise to some opposing views, which made for more considered reading. Of course that magazine was published with a monthly deadline, which is very different to the way reviews are conducted now

There was a period a couple of years ago where a number of games with heavy amounts of what is often referred to as 'fan service' were given negative reviews by Nintendo Life. The die-hard fans of this type of game would regularly appear in the comments criticising the reviewers for their 'prudish' / 'woke' / 'ignorant' (delete as appropriate) attitudes and how they were not qualified to review such titles. The staff would often respond saying that their low scores were based primarily on the gameplay rather than the 'fan service'. Thankfully this situation seems to have calmed down a bit recently.

@FishyS yeah, what I meant is that it was a very symbolical thing for NL as Crash was a direct competitor to Mario, and in certain instances the Bandicoot outperformed the Plumber. I'm not for/against Nintendo nor Sony, (maybe I prefer Nintendo now since Sony decided to kill off all of their best game franchises) but giving 7 to a trilogy of one of the best platformers of all times was downright ridiculous. It was the only time I felt cringed out by the NL score.

@TheRealKyleHyde now that's interesting, I haven't heard about that. What games was it about? Also, on a complete sidenote, Hotel Dusk is an absolute masterpiece of a game, easily one of the best storytelling games of all time

@Princess_Lilly If I remember correctly, it was things like the more recent Senran Kagura games and various visual novels. And yes, Hotel Dusk is brilliant!

@Princess_Lilly
lol i literally just bought that the other day, and I'm loving it.
And yeah from what i've played 7/10 don't make much sense 🤔

oh wait
"This is definitely worth a look if you're a fan of 3D platformers, but just as was the case back in the '90s, Crash isn't in quite the same league as Mario when it comes to playability, inventiveness and entertainment."
now it does

@sForzan Personally I'm very biased against crash just because I find the character weirdly ugly and unappealing looking 😝 So I've never played any of the main games even though I love most platformers. This type of subconscious reaction is why it is hard to make unbiased reviews.

@FishyS
Maybes all reviewers need to be in the original position
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

@Princess_Lilly, @TheRealKyleHyde, the discourse popped up around a lot of reviews around excessively fan-servicy games like Gun Gun Pixies & a few harem visual novels (while many of the games probably were/are pretty mediocre, there tended to be a bit of a vibe of condensation from the reviewer around the subject matter itself). There was even controversy around one of the Sword Art Online reviews where the piece called out fan-service (and as far as I'm aware, those games aren't even any worse than your bog standard JRPG in terms of the stuff. Certainly not on the level of Senran Kagura or the like).

Pretty much all of this happened in the couple years after XC2's release, which seemed to cause a huge discourse around fanservice around here. There was always some of that before then (with censorship controversies surrounding Tokyo Mirage Sessions & some of the 3DS Fire Emblem games), but XC2 seemed to be the tipping point.

@sForzan yeah, exactly. This sentence cringed me out so badly, I still remembered the bad taste it left.

@FishyS yeah, he is a goofy character, I can see how he can be either loved or hated

@RR529 Thank you so much for the comprehensive explanation! None of the games are on my list, but it's a pretty bad situation nonetheless