Video game reviews are, for the most part, kind of ridiculous. The problem with reviews is that video games are too interactive and subjective to easily evaluate critically, unless it's clearly very good or very bad.
As a primarily JRPG-focused gamer, I'd like to echo the previously expressed sentiment that there is a bias toward Western titles and companies, or those Eastern-made titles that have gained massive popularity in the west already, generally speaking. If you look at the best reviewed games of 2017, you see things like Mario, Zelda, and Persona at the top - all Eastern, but all the nth title in some already successful blockbuster series. You see American and European indie titles.
There's also a heavy, heavy bias toward "the classics," without an actual grip on what those classics really were or what they did right and wrong. Just one example of a JRPG that suffered this fate was I am Setsuna; one of my personal favorites, and widely agreed to have a great soundtrack, was only moderately received by critics and by a substantial potion of JRPG fans... because everyone went into it expecting Chrono Trigger. People literally expected the first retro-JRPG title made by a new dev team from Square Enix would be an experience equivalent to what is generally agreed to be one of the best games of all time, just because it used a very similar combat system and had other nods and references. Literally what? It was never evaluated on its own merits. It's not a groundbreaking experience, it's not the best ever at anything that it does, but it's now characterized as bland and unremarkable because it's held to the standards of entirely different titles, and not of its niche or genre as a whole.
Continuing the above, the "7.8/10 too much water" review was probably the most ridiculous that I've ever come across as a gamer. The writer clearly wanted something from those games, and clearly had certain expectations simply because of the franchise associated with the games. And then... docks it points because it has "too much water." When it has less water than the games on which it is directly based, and water travel is physically faster. Completely unreasonable. A similar situation occurred when Kotaku staff chose to review Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Out of their entire staff, the person they chose to review the game was their token JRPG nerd - who had already outwardly expressed his personal distaste for the original Xenoblade Chronicles. To literally not a single person's surprise, the person who personally disliked Xenoblade Chronicles gave a mixed-to-negative professional assessment to its direct sequel. Why do we do these things? Why do people who don't like a series or don't understand a game's basis review games that they inevitably will not like?
I don't know. Maybe it's just me - I tend to chronically disagree with critical assessments of most games that I like, and I know some will take that as me being unable to accept criticism of my favorite titles and series. But overall, I think there are tons of game reviews that wildly miss the mark. If a game would be enjoyable to the typical person in its target audience, then that needs to be the main point on which it is evaluated - its level of success in achieving what it set out to achieve in the first place, and then after that its new ideas and innovation. If a game would not be enjoyable for a typical person in its target audience, then you can dock points and elaborate upon which mechanics or elements cause that. If a game does some things right and some things wrong, it gets an appropriately mixed review with explanation as such.
But really, I've rambled, so I'll get back to the point - the biggest thing is assigning the right person to review the game. Someone who knows what the goals of the game are, who doesn't personally dislike the series or entire genre, and who doesn't have any unrealistic expectations or illusions.
