#oneaday Day 528: Why Do I Do This To Myself

I don't know why I do this to myself… but sometimes when I cover an older game, I like to look back on reviews from the time when it was originally released, just to kind of take the temperature of how it was received by the more "mainstream" side of things. I inevitably end up wanting to throw something through my screen in frustration at the terrible articles I find myself reading, but looking at some Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis reviews today got me thinking.

We give today's games press a lot of shit — and rightfully so, in many cases. But, looking back on some of this crap, it's hard to deny that, generally speaking, and sociopolitical grandstanding aside… things are generally quite a bit better than they were a decade or two ago, at least in terms of some reviewers (not all, sadly) actually putting in a bit of effort to 1) spend some time with the game and 2) do some research.

Look outside of the commercial mainstream press, of course, and you're much more likely to find some genuinely good quality writing about games. I follow and hang out online with a lot of people who are very good at what they do, and none of them are "professionals".

Here's 1up.com's review of Mana Khemia from 2008, for example. Just over 500 words for a 40+ hour game. The actual content of the review speaks about nothing beyond what you see within the first couple of hours of the game. It does not address the game's context as part of the Atelier series. It goes into no detail about either the combat or alchemy mechanics. It describes the plot as "familiar" and "easy to swallow" without examining any of it or describing any details whatsoever. And it refers to the characters as "generic" without elaborating on whatever the hell that means — and after teasing the fact that your initial companions are "a quiet bookworm with pink hair and a feisty half-girl/half-cat monstrosity", which makes them sound pretty interesting to me.

(Also, Jess is absolutely, positively neither quiet nor a bookworm, leading me to believe that the reviewer's assessment of her is based entirely on her appearance in the opening credits, where she says nothing because there is no dialogue in the opening credits — because they're opening credits — and where she happens to be sitting at a desk reading a book. But then I probably shouldn't expect anything more from someone who admits in the first paragraph to "mashing the X button to speed up the text" rather than paying attention to the narrative.)

Oh, and they also moan about the English voice acting, apparently completely unaware that the very good original Japanese voice track is right there on the disc for anyone's enjoyment — something that PS2-era NIS America was actually very good about including in most of their releases.

This is far from the only review of Mana Khemia that has issues like this, and… I dunno, it feels weird. I used to look up to these websites and the people who wrote for them, but then back when I was reading them, I tended not to be looking up information on weird late-era PS2 RPGs that came out two years after the Xbox 360 launched. I was looking up information on whatever the prettiest new brown game featuring bald space marines was. Ahh, good times.

As I often argue on MoeGamer and my video series, though, a good or otherwise interesting game is timeless, and just because Mana Khemia was slapped with some mediocre, low-effort reviews back in the day doesn't mean it can't be enjoyed now. In fact, I'd argue it's easier to enjoy it now, because you divorce it entirely from the context in which it was released and examine it purely on its own terms — and as an installment in the series it forms part of.

It's just a bit of a shame that games like this are forever branded with low ratings on Metacritic, and thus rarely talked about, analysed or otherwise celebrated. Oh well, only one thing to do then, huh…?