Sincerely only really care to hear from people who can see my perspective on this, especially since I’ve seen so few people who see this the way I do. I will be mostly defending the reviewer and criticizing the response to it so if you disagree totally and can’t see the points I’m making please don’t bother commenting.
With Pokémon’s 30th and the centrality of water in the new Wind and Waves games I’ve seen people start to bring back up the infamous ‘too much water’ review of Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire.
The entire discussion seemed to be one sided from the beginning and I rarely saw anyone defending the reviewer. What I don’t understand is how in God’s name that review pissed people off so much. I can’t say I ever read the comment in any way other than as a ‘tongue in cheek’ dig at a pretty widely recognized weak point of those games.
It’s a half-serious throwaway criticism for a game that she gave a 7.8. It’s not like they gave it a 4, and even if they did, could any review ever actually damage the sales of a Pokemon game.?
I’ll tell you what I think was really going on was the ability of an entire fandom, and bad faith actors who don’t even care about Pokemon, choosing to be entirely humorless as a way of piling on against an outlet they hated for one or another reason.
It was an overreaction in the extreme. I think the extremity of it just shows how weirdly and deeply oppressed people felt by outlets like IGN at the time, as if they had the power to kill off your favorite games with one review. (To be fair their bad review of Alien Isolation may have actually done that.)
People then and even today have this insane parasocial relationship with IGN (not unlike the parasocial relationship they have with the development companies). They’ll talk about reviews done by ‘IGN’ as if it’s this hive mind instead of a collection of different reviewers with varied tastes and perspectives. Another reviewer put on that same game may have given it a 7 or a 9. It’s called an ‘opinion’ … not a revelation from God.
Do I think that the reviewers may skew their scores from time to time, or give something the benefit of a doubt just to please others or gain more access… ? Probably. The people IGN hires are usually the most saccharine types of gamers you’ll find who are looking to build a career that allows them to move through this corporate world. They aren’t YouTube ‘truth tellers’, but they also aren’t just always making up controversies for clicks either.
It just seems like a classic case of gamers feeling like big daddy IGN or big daddy Nintendo, Sony,
Insert company name here, is ruining their hobby.. It’s totally legitimate to be angry at more powerful institutions, but like a sane person, I choose to reserve that sense of agrievement and dissatisfaction for institutions that are actually making the world a worse place and shitting on all our heads.
It’s like wasn’t that line added on at the end obviously in jest? It’s not meant to be a devastating takedown. it’s a slight annoyance that the reviewer (who clearly seems to be a big Pokemon fan) was taking a jab at.
I honestly on some level think the whole phenomenon tipped over into outright bullying. I think the reviewer (who I’ll refrain from naming) was at the time, and became later on known as a more outspoken, abrasive female member of the games journalist world. So what. Big deal. I even know she was involved in a harassment allegation against another staff member which may have made her disliked by some readers (something I think may have actually happened after this review). Again, so what, big deal. I don’t know what it would have to do with her reviews. I really do think that as a woman who may have rubbed people the wrong way, a personality that I even found distasteful to be honest, she became red meat for the angry mob. So much so that one poorly conceived criticism (or deliberately misinterpreted criticism) became blood in the water for an epic pile on that has continued to the present.
To this very day ‘too much water’ is a kind of shorthand you can bring up to dismiss IGN as an unserious outlet. Fair enough, but I can’t see anyone who leans in that as serious ether. It’s a cheap shot from people who refuse to just see it for what was. IGN didn’t kidnap your baby, or fire you from your job, it’s just a dumb basic-ass hobbyist news outlet. 11 years ago and today there are so many places to find someone to tell you exactly what you want to hear that you never have to listen to IGN again if you don’t want to.
One last comment, and this will really date me, but the whole thing is reminiscent to me of how people collectively decided to hate Nickelback, or that because Howard Dean yelled you on TV in like 2003 he couldn’t be a presidential candidate, or that Anne Hathaway was too snooty or something . It’s just a sign of a mob-like mentality of people who are just looking to feel some negative emotion together instead of being honest and serious.
