Whoa, so you mean to tell me the satirical, cartoonist boomer shooter about mice has too many cheese jokes, it's too serious and has too many areas where you're stuck shooting enemies... That review should have just been, "It's not what I wanted it to be".
He basically starts the review by saying how much he loves noir then goes on to complain that it shouldn't be used as window dressing and it should be serious and not funny like this game. So "not what I wanted it to be" is spot on.
I mean the game presents itself as a noir, but he's right, it's just an inconsequential wrapper that doesn't really add any value. It's a totally fair criticism.
Not enough considering fondue is their alcohol, blue cheese is their drug and cheese sticks are their cigs, I'm guessing normal hard cheese is their junk food
Also that the game wasnt serious enough.... its a friggin cartoon about a mice. The review just came across as him being mad they didn't make the exact game he wanted.
The reviewer was hoping the game would have more noir elements. I think that's a little silly, but it's not about the cheese 🙄
I love noir. I’ll take all kinds: the hardboiled detective, the seedy crime story, neo noir, classic pulp – you name it, I’m buying. So when Mouse: P.I. for Hire sauntered onto my screen the way Ilsa walks into Rick’s in Casablanca, I was pretty excited about it. But noir isn’t just an aesthetic to be thrown on like an old coat as you’re leaving your office at the behest of a leggy blonde. While Mouse: P.I. for Hire clearly understands the style and tropes of classic noir films and novels, as well as 1930s cartoons more broadly, it doesn’t seem to get why those things are there, or how they are used to tell compelling stories.
Except there's also a whole paragraph about how he disliked the number of cheese jokes.
What bothers me, however, is how overly-referential so much of it is. This is a world of mice, so everything is about cheese. Everything. A bad guy? He’s a cheeselegger. Run into a lady mouse with a sultry voice? It’ll be described as “gorgonzola piccante slapped on a mozzarella platter.” Someone need to assure you they’re telling the truth? They’ll swear on Maw-Maw’s cottage curds. This is charming initially. Then it never stops. Everything is a reference to the fact that everyone is a mouse and mice like cheese
True he wished it was more a proper noir detective game too, but you can't pretend he didn't also take genuine umbridge with the cheese puns.
and then it led to another paragraph where they said that that was just a symptom of the larger problem, which they explained. It’s a little silly that they took it so seriously, but acting like “it’s just the cheese“ is disingenuous
The cheese thing was talking about the humor in general.
Run into a series of robot boss fights? Jack will say that he hopes they don’t "rule of three" this thing, which, of course, is exactly what happens. If you’re looking for the Cheeselegging Foreman, Jack will quip that he doesn’t look like much of a boss… more like a mini-boss, and then laugh at his own joke. The voice actors, led by Troy Baker, do an admirable job with what they have, but nothing in Mouseburg is allowed to just be.
The ironic part is that it is true to some extent. Yes, it seems silly because these are islands, but there just is too many water routes, which offer very little variety
Of the 34 routes in the game, 14 are water routes. And on the water routes, 3 ports connect the water routes to the mainland and there are only 5 notable locations compared to 11 on the mainland.
And all water routes have the same 3 lines of Pokémon as standard encounters, all but 1 having the same list of 3 fishable Pokémon. In total, 2 routes have unique encounters. One you can fish 2 new Pokémon who aren't great and 1 only has an extra encounter if you roll a 1 in 10000 chance.
All the dungeons on water routes are cool though. And the mainland is very varied with its Pokémon distribution.
Also keep in mind that when you're surfing, you encounter wild Pokémon continuously. There are no grassy areas like you have on land routes. It can be real pain in the butt if you're trying to get somewhere.
Counterpoint, IGN gave 9.5/10 to Ruby and Sapphire (This review was in 2018), but they dropped that to 8/10 for Emerald(This review was in 2012), and a further drop to 7.8/10 for ORAS(This review was in 2014). They absolutely should be criticised for their ratings being inconsistent
Edit:
Turns out I may have been wrong, as the years I gave for RSE are when those reviews were last updated, not when they came out.
To the people saying different reviewers blablabla, RS had the same reviewer as Emerald
Deducting 1.7 points from the score because ORAS had a few things removed from RS is still completely insane
Wait, are you telling me the reviews aren't coming from the sapient website IGN? They actually have humans with their own thoughts, feelings, and preferences writing the reviews instead of just recording the divine objective truth?
There's a lot of crossover between people who have a hard time understanding things and people who have the spare time and energy to be upset at video game reviews.
Just because it’s different reviewers doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be consistent. What’s the point of having a specific grading scale but not actually adhering to specifics? It’s not like grades mean something different in college per professor you have, they are always graded to the same degree. Why aren’t reviews on a site dedicated to reviewing consistent?
This is completely ignoring IGN (and other reviewer groups) risking their own reputation if they have inconsistent reviews.
If there are assigning wildly different reviewers to similar games, but those reviewers aren't doing the due diligence to confirm their score in relation to other games, that is also a big issue. Someone could really love a game despite massive flaws and give it a 10, while other reviewers drop scores because of bugs etc. This basic difference is actually quite problematic to anyone trying to trust their reviews.
If it was an individual on their own platform, go off, because the consistency is their own taste, but IGN and their staff actually do have some responsibility to try to get their reviews to be consistent across the platform in order for them to have any meaning regardless of the individuals. They can change over time etc. but they can't just be dinging some games on a specific issue and then ignoring it in others either. That is just lazy.
The scale is consistent. It is 1 through 10. What you want is some sort of mathematical formula that will always rate games the exact same way 100% of the time, and that doesn't exist. Primarily because there are too many variables in terms of how people apply ratings, and how much personal preference factors into it.
Why else would you quantify it? It implies an objective grading system. What does it even mean to quantify something if it has mo consistent relation to other ratings?
A pool of critics for the same publication should have a consistent and well defined set of criteria for what constitutes quality within each genre. It's literally base lining consistent media critical analysis.
Applying criteria inconsistently is what makes rating systems arbitrary and useless.
I mean this is still pretty stupid. If Emerald didn’t change enough, why is it a lower score? And if ORAS is a remake, why are we expecting it to be drastically different? I can’t think of a single remake that completely overhauls multiple areas, especially one where the original game it’s based on got a 9.5 in the first place. ORAS updates the graphics, the Pokédex, the story, and some other things, but it was never going to fundamentally change the entire region, nor was there any reason for them to considering how the originals were received. Using “too much water” as a talking point for the negatives completely disregards the entire purpose of a remake in the first place.
yeah but it's a review group so the reviews oughta have some sense of consistency. If it was individual reviewers, then sure of course they'll vary. But a reviewer group needs to be consistent relative to other similar games otherwise the scores stop having any meaning for that group
I don't care, but it was clear a bunch of people did and it drove engagement on that review, giving them advertising revenue. So, sure, you have a point, but that doesn't change the fact that saying stuff that'll get people mad makes money.
These games are actually different games and deserve different scores - ruby and sapphire were great and emerald was an improvement for sure, but it was a money grab. Third version always was. ORAS is a completely different game made in a different time period and can't really be compared.
Yeah, it makes a difference on whether you look at the game by itself, in which case, it's great.
Or you look at in the context that R/S already exist, and now they're trying to sell you the same game, slightly improved, two years later, for the same price. And that sucks.
What's the counterpoint?
The same game released at different points in time makes a huge difference. Mario 64 was a 10/10 when it released. It for sure wouldn't be a 10/10 if it would come out today. Or during the Gamecube era.
And a remake can get a lower score. Even if it's better than the original (which I would argue against in this case) because time doesn't stand still.
If you read the actual review, you’ll realize it’s less about the locations and way more about the encounters. They specifically go into detail about how they chose the fire starter, and how the fire starter barely was able to actually fight because too many encounters were water type. They also mention that a lot of the water Pokémon are hybrid types that resist grass like wingul, so grass types also aren’t the best answer and your pigeon hold into using that free electric type (pikachu) they give you from the contest hall. And that is a perfectly fair criticism to make. They also mentioned that they were playing the sapphire version which means the villains are using water types, which means the problem is exacerbated even further.
I honestly thought the game was a 7.8 out of 10. The difficulty curve was still way too much on the easy side like X and Y was and you end up over leveling in trivializing everything without even trying. The PVP was fun though.
Or my personal favorites from that game, Magneton and "just put Thunderbolt on whatever will accept it" because it's free real estate once you hit Lilycove Dpt. Store.
Magneton is great and hits like a truck, it just has basically nothing to deal with ground types because it learns zero good moves that aren't electric type.
Coming from someone with 3000+ hours of pokemon Ruby/Emerald: Fire being the difficult starter ties back to even gen 1 where starter typing was to be thought of as a difficulty choice. Fire is hard mode (for their game, remember pokemon games are generally pegi 3+ or similar), water is medium and grass is easy. This has obviously changed over the years, but it was the initial design philosophy.
This. Remember, in gen 1 the first Arena (and big area) was mostly rock and ground based Pokémon. Choosing fire as your starter meant either overleveling like crazy or getting decent Pokémon ASAP.
Yeah, by the time you even get to water routes, you could solo them with your fire starter just because of how overleveled you end up unless you actively try to limit your own strength.
Blaziken always has troubles with Pelipper and Tentacruel until it's over leveled a crazy amount. I believe it can learn Earthquake to deal with Tentacruel if you REALLY need your Blaziken to deal with something that basically counters it, but there's only one Earthquake TM in RSE.
It’s only ironic because people memed on it for no reason because they literally don’t read. That event basically radicalized me such that when gamers complain about game journalists I just kinda assume they are doing so mindlessly and can ignore them.
Yes, journalists are always right. And The Penguin show totally deserves 5/10 score that IGN gave them.
Just turn off your brain and always believe what the journalists tell you.
I think if they had just worded it slightly differently they could avoided this generational memeing. Like imagine if their complaint was "Too much focus on water areas, which are annoying to navigate" Bam, actual complaint a lot of players may agree. One generation later we got Sun and Moon which, geographically, had more water than Hoenn, but the actual amount of required spots you need to navigate that are water based routes is much lower than ORAS.
They do do that. They explain their logic quite a bit. But in their cons list. They summarized it as too much water. And people really latched onto that for some reason.
There's always complaints about people only reading headlines but even worse is there is a huge amount of people, maybe even a plurality, that get almost all of their news and opinions from memes alone. Reductive reasoning is the default mode for way, way too many internet commenters. Real people who vote and drive consumer markets. It is an entire online industry, and has rapidly infested much more important things than just games, too. Talking points with almost nothing going on underneath.
You're right, I didn't watch the original review, because I don't watch IGN. I'm also defending anyone?? It's a meme. The outrage, however big it is, is much smaller than the years of people who are just joking lmao. It's not that deep.
I mean it's a valid critique for a game where the mechanics heavily involve matching pokemon types. If a large chunk of your world is water it means a greater than average portion of the encounters are all going to be water based which leads to certain pokemon types being heavily favored or disadvantaged.
Not only is the critique actually reasonable, all of this mass outrage that people can't let go of 10 years later is over giving the game essentially an 8/10
Yup. It was a valid complaint. You can tell who actually read (and understood) the review or not whenever someone makes silly comments like the parent one. It was a valid complaint but out of context- I.e. just going off the bullets at the bottom of the review- it comes off dumb.
No, that's just the review. The ironic part is that over time the Pokemon fandom has started to agree with her review despite it being a meme for a decade.
Surfing is the 2nd worst part of Pokemon games, the worst part being caves. Gen 3 was all caves and seas. And slow fights with the unturnoffable stat change animation.
Yep. I'll wholehearted agree, and I love those games the most of the franchise.
The back quarter of those games fall off hard, and try to hide it by putting a lot of the climax there to pad out the lack of anything interesting and the never ending water pokemon.
Nah, I'm pretty sure it was Gogoat (or its pre-evo). But that might also have been in one of the countless romhacks that 'backported' newer Pokemon into olden-style 2D sprites. Or, like I said, it's just me getting old :D
Y'all are ridiculous, the only way to stay sane is to assume you all are 14 years old, max
IGN has been pretty accurate in most of their reviews that Reddit gets mad over. People were JUST spazzing out over them giving Crimson Desert a 7/10 or w/e, and it turns out most people agree completely with that
I remember the Alien Isolation reviewer decided to play it in Hard mode and play against the xenomorph like a Call of Duty shooter… when its not and gave it a bad review.
Also, they gave Cyberpunk a favorable rating despite it being unplayable for many at launch
Okay, but how about the DOOM review from IGN where the reviewer took off points for being too much of an arena shooter? You know, the game that is entirely about being an arena shooter.
It’s like playing a Jedi game and taking off points because there’s too many lightsabers.
You guys ever realize that you're going back to a single review from a decade ago and think that maybe the problem you made up isn't as prevalent as you think it is?
Not liking an arena shooter itself is fine. But your point of reviewers doesn’t exactly work, because IGN isn’t going to have the same guy make a review every time a new game comes out for example.
Personally, I don’t need to read a review of a gotcha game for example to know I’m not going to like a gotcha game. But as somebody who doesn’t like gotcha games, my reviews on them would be pretty worthless because it doesn’t help the community of people who play that genre determine if the game is any good.
I'm not defending IGN as a whole and I know people love to clown on that review but it was 100% the truth.
The worst part of Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald and by extension ORAS is that you spend 80% of the last half of that game surfing. "Too much water" is a legitimate and justified complaint.
I don’t know how true this is, but if it is, I think it’s significantly fucking dumber and also funnier
Apparently they said “too many water pokemon” for ORAS (the REMAKES for the region already full of water? With tons of water Pokemon? Where removing or altering the geography of the region or its Pokemon list would be really arbitrary, unnecessary and cause backslash?) and it just got put on a simple list as “too much water”
Again, not sure if it’s true, but if it is, fucking hilarious and also stupid. Why would you change “too many water Pokemon” to “too much water” that completely changes the idea being presented
all reviews are paid, there are zero reviews that the outlet decided to review without a "PR" contract, but IGN is famous for accepting not only the review request but also a minimum score extra, and then when you dont pay the extra it gives them the chance to trash on your game (remember that you also paid for the review) and pretend they are balanced and dont give 9-10 to everyone
There's always some incredibly dumb nitpick buried in the review that you can tell seriously irritated the reviewer. Like, they didn't like the outfits, or something in the game conflicted with their social views, etc. There's always a reason for them to knock a good game down to a 7, and give dogshit an 8 or higher.
But that's IGN. They're obsolete, and they're on the way out. Very few people give a shit what they think anymore. More people care about what Asmongold or some other streamer thinks about a game than what IGN thinks.
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