He came back with: "Hmm... I think in general we do, yes, but we don't necessarily agree with what they say. Of course it's the only important Japanese games magazine, and developers here have always read it. But on the other hand, I think the length of Famitsu's reviews is a weak point... Japan needs more major gaming websites without magazine connections and better scoring systems for reviews."
That's quite a diatribe! And I found myself agreeing with every point made. Famitsu's reviews are too short. It doesn't have any serious competition in the Japanese games mag business. And Japan does need more serious independent game review sites.
There's no doubting the excellent range of news- and feature-oriented game sites in the Japanese corner of the Internet; just have a glance at Impress Watch, Famitsu.com, Gpara and Inside Games for some indication of what's out there. But for interesting, opinionated reviews Japanese gamers' best option at present is to scour the blogs of other Japanese gamers. (That, or visit Amazon.co.jp for a laugh.)
Famitsu: home to the world's shortest videogame reviews (and the world's longest previews)
In the professional sphere of Japanese game reviews, there are two extremes at play.
Famitsu and other Japanese magazines tend to provide the viewpoints of three or four reviewers, each of whom contribute a single paragraph of "review" text and a score (typically on a scale of one to 10). These reviews often fail to convey any meaningful criticism and instead usually read like the "summary" (or, in GameSpy's case, "pros and cons") sections of game reviews in the western media. That's the extremely short side of things.
The other extreme is seen in Japanese game previews, including Famitsu's own, which are typically detailed to the point of being thesis-length spoiler-filled volumes, effectively telling you everything you could possibly want to know about a game (and a whole heap of info that you don't) before the game is released.
This style has also seeped through to some of Japan's professional online review resources. Take Impress Watch, for example. This site runs reviews of only a small percentage of new releases, but when it does review a game, Impress Watch gets into the mood by analyzing the minutiae. Unfortunately, it often forgets to say what's good or bad about the points being described. As a result, such "reviews" are almost interchangeable with instruction manuals. I'm all for the notion of game reviews without numeric scoring -- and Impress Watch doesn't provide any ratings at the end of its reviews, which is great -- but such a noble ideal can only work if the reviewer tells readers why they should or should not be interested in a game.
It may be that Japanese readers just don't want to hear proper criticism in reviews, of course. Maybe Japanese reviews are supposed to fulfil a different purpose. I know there are plenty of loved-up Japanese film magazines where the "reviews" never contain a word against any movie, but that's precisely why my film-maniac wife would read the only magazine where reviewers dared to do their job without fear of causing offence. Predictably, that fine publication went out of business last year...
