http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2008/09/13/opoona/1 Opoona may look all casual and cheerful, but there's a suprisingly deep RPG experience under the hood here and much of it is in the Final Fantasy vein. Can Opoona overcome the cartoon graphics though and become a must have Wii game? We find out...
If you check out the bit-tech.net scoring system at the bottom of each of the reviews, you'll see that both games sit quite comfortably in their respective scoring brackets.
Look, don't get me wrong. I love bit-tech and I visit the site on a daily basis. But I can't shake the feeling that you were overly critical on Clear Sky while being more lenient on other, lesser games. Besides, Clear Sky's problems can be solved with a patch or two. Opoona is stuck this way for the rest of its "lifetime".
And why did you bring this up in a thread which contains an entirely different topic. Bit-Tech review stuff as they get it. If it is under par it deserves a low score. Yes it is a shame but now the developer knows the mistakes they make and are trying to rectify them.
This discussion doesn't belong in this thread, but as has been said many times in the Clear Sky thread, we will be coming back to Clear Sky to see if the patches have fixed the problems. We judge a game on its merits at the time of review, not on its promise for the future. If we did the latter, we'd just be writing previews and putting a score on the end - that's irresponsible. "Forget about all the problems and just focus on what's good because we'll fix them later." - I've heard that many times and it's simply not acceptable for a game to ship in the state Clear Sky did. If we score games that ship in Clear Sky's state highly, we're essentially saying that a bug-infested and system-crashing game is OK, which, for anyone in their right mind is simply not the case. Everyone complains about the multitude of patches released for games these days and Clear Sky is a classic example of an unfinished game and it's going to require more patching than any other game in recent memory to fix it. Yet, all of a sudden, a slew of patches to fix a broken game is OK. This thread isn't about Clear Sky, so don't troll.
It's not a case of judging all games under one view though. If you're into games like Clear Sky then there's a high chance you won't like this game, but that's for you to decide. What we're saying is that this game is 'Worth Considering' to quote the score guide. For a JRPG - it has good controls, a decent story, you can pick it up quickly and it's fun, though it does have flaws. Is it for everyone? Not at all, as it has a totally different audience. Clear Sky on the other hand, even a week after the UK release (which came a while after the original release) was still very buggy and unstable, to the point that our entire experience with it was tainted. As we've proved in the forum discussion, the latest patches STILL haven't solved the problems we've had with the game even on a number of different machines and hardware configurations. The 1 - 10 scoring system isn't universal and isn't faultless and it's up to the reader first to decide if a game appeals to them, with our score then acting as a gauge of quality. To take an example, I could review something like Peggle and give it a 10/10 because it is fun, accessible and quick. And I could take a game like Crysis and give it an 8/10. Does this mean that Peggle is a more accomplished and significant game than Crysis? No. Does it mean that everybody in the world can pick up Peggle and enjoy it wholly and love it above all other games? No. It means that if you like casual games then Peggle is in our opinion the best game on the market and is well designed, to a high quality. Conversely it means that if you like FPS games then Crysis isn't the best game ever, though it still has high points. It means you shouldn't blindly pick up Crysis and expect it to wow you utterly. Specifically here, we are saying that Opoona is a decent quality JRPG, though it has a few problems. It performs the basic requirement of a game, is fun, but doesn't really wow us massively. STALKER meanwhile is, as we say in the review, a 7 or 8 in terms of gameplay, but a 3 overall because it doesn't fulfill the basic requirement of the product and is a disappointing experience as a result. It simply shouldn't have been released in that state - the state in which we had to judge it. As we mention in the CS review and discussion, the problem with Clear Sky is something that could very well be cleared up however and we will therefore be re-reviewing it in the new year. Opoona may be stuck this way for the rest of it's life (unless that too gets a patch or a free expansion or so on, which changes this argument even more), but as it is it isn't a bad game.
Again, sorry for "trolling", that was not my intention. I was just saying that a lot of people don't read the review and just look at the score. I read it so I know why you scored it the way you did, but someone who just looks at the score will not understand that. I hope I explained myself, I didn't mean to hijack the thread.
