Some people say objectivity is impossible to achieve period, some say objectivity is achievable but doesn't have a lot of value or lacks anything interesting to say, some people think striving for objectivity is important when dealing with game critique because you don't want a review to just be fanboy gushing or bashing depending on the context. What is my opinion on that, though?
It depends on the game. Joseph Anderson did a far better job
of articulating this than I will in his video called "Little Nightmares
and the Value of the Experience" but, to summarize briefly, the example of
The Last Guardian is specifically a Fumito Ueda problem, which is that he
doesn't make games as much as he makes experiences.
And the reason I say this is a problem, although you could
just as easily call it a quirk instead, is because if a game like many of
Ueda's values the experience over everything else, how well you enjoy the game
will depend on how well the experience it conveys clicks with you. Going for
his examples, Ico is boring, Shadow of the Colossus is great, and The Last
Guardian is just more Ico. The reason Shadow of the Colossus is such a spike
there is because it's the only game among these three where, if the experience
doesn't click with you, you've still got fairly good gameplay to fall back on.
I myself tend to enjoy good gameplay over everything else
because I tend not to click with any experience. If the game has an intended
experience it wants me to go with, I will probably dislike it because I tend to
be a person who's so far removed from experience that I don't even have
memories from my own first person perspective, every memory I have is
visualized through a camera that's off to the side of me and therefore
disconnected from me.
I know I'm an outlier there, since I think pretty much
everyone except me remembers from their own perspective at least with the stuff
they were present for but my mind works very differently.
Regardless, for games that are all about the experience, an
objective POV is pretty worthless since there's no way to be objective about an
experience since your experience is more rooted in your own perspective with
your own emotions and biases but, for games that rely more on polish, I'd say
it's pretty worthwhile to have an objective look at a game so that you can tell
whether it's good or bad, or overrated or underrated, or any other questions
related to those.
For a game that is more about being a good game with good mechanics and all that it is good to know exactly what you're in for. Even if the reviewer loves or hates a game in question, it's good to know what mechanics you're in for, a sort of story summary, and audio visual feedback from a video review so that you have an idea of what to expect.
Sometimes, your perception of a game can change depending on what you were expecting going into it. For example, if you go into DmC: Devil May Cry expecting what DMC3 and 4 presented, you're going to be disappointed because everything is so drastically different but, if you take it on its own terms, it's not completely unbearable. The story and characters might be but the gameplay is serviceable at least.
Likewise, if you go into Halo expecting Metroid Prime, you're also going to be disappointed because the two are fundamentally very different. The same goes for Silent Hill expecting Resident Evil, and to different extents going into any 3D Zelda expecting any other 3D Zelda.
However, if you get your expectations sorted out ahead of time, you can find yourself with a radically different opinion. This is why some level of objectivity is important, even though you do want to have opinions within the review.
That's all for now. See you next time.
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