John's nerd corner

Review Score Philosophy

I do not see myself as a serious critic. Critics who seem to think very highly of themselves are quite obnoxious, frankly.

However, I guess years of following video game reviews (movies and music too but video games has usually been the biggest one) has given me a particular interest in the thought process and methodology behind picking a score.

I haven't even used scores anytime I've talked about anime or video games on this blog. But I do use scores on AniList. And I first wrote a lot of what you're about to see here over there, but frankly I kept getting embarrassed about having so much text in the bio box, soooooo....

Anyway. Review scores.

In the first place, anytime a review has a score attached, the internet can't handle it very well. Most people just have a reaction to the number and ignore the actual content of the review.

Even so, I do think scores are somewhat useful. They're a quick way to tell you the reviewer's broad feelings about a work. But that's it. To really understand what thoughts a reviewer has about a work of art, they have to tell you. You've got to read the actual paragraphs.

I think numbers also fail to be particularly useful when people only use a range of 7 - 10. I think I once I saw an AniList review that said "This show is bad. 7/10."

It does seem like many people see scores as being similar to a grade in school, and thus they see anything less than a 90% as unacceptable.

I don't think our school mindset prepares us very well for reviewing art, however. Generally my experience with school is that they want you to do things a certain way, and they have specific requirements you're supposed to meet, and as long as you meet those requirements, you get the full grade. But there's no rubric for art. Ok, so you want to be "entertaining" maybe. But that's so subjective. Not everyone is even entertained by the same things. And furthermore, a lot of art is not even primarily trying to entertain. There are other feelings to explore. But let's say you meet the bar of "being super fun to watch." Does that really make for a masterpiece? It's up for each critic to decide for themselves.

The internet may have an unspoken and dorky obsession with establishing definitive rankings for every single piece of media in existence (why else do people just bring up how movies or shows are bad totally unprompted so often?) but I think that we should stop holding on to the idea of consensus so strongly. Different critics have different perspectives because they have different experience, and if you actually listen to what they have to say, who knows? Maybe it can change the way we think about a piece of art.

But enough about all that. Let me give you the summary of how I use the 10-point scale.

I think when I am picking a number, there is a subconscious scale of excitement versus disappointment. What I mean is, if an anime does really cool stuff but then does things I dislike, you could call that high excitement, but with a large dose of disappointment weighing against it. So it'll end up at a 7/10. Or, maybe an anime is consistently enjoyable and doesn't do anything I dislike, but it also just doesn't really elicit strong emotions from me. We might call that low disappointment, but only medium excitement. 7/10. So there are different reasons things get the numbers they do, but it ultimately comes down to my gut feeling, really.

When we're talking abut anime and manga, story definitely gets the most weight in how I feel about a work, but I factor in other elements too.

So here's the list of what the numbers are supposed to mean to me (basically):

Alright yeah. That's it. Bye.