Hello,
As you know in these recent days we got plenty of game sales into Steam and similar digital delivery services. Generally in order to understand more of the game's I'm going to buy I give a quick look at the Metacritic score for both critics and users.
This is when I noticed a strange pattern with people giving tons of "0" or "10" to many games, leaving me a bit puzzled to the point that I decided to search on the net for similar services for anime (like Anidb or MAL or even Baka-Updates for manga and Vndb for Visual Novels) in order to understand if this is a common trend or not.
The experience was a painful one having to go through thousands of entries, but one thing is definitely clear here. Most people on the internet can't give proper judgement over a particular anime/manga series!
Wait, are you asking me why I'm so drastic? Let's try to give a look at one of these entries and understand the logic behind these votes before coming to a conclusion.
Let's give a look at Sankarea's manga page on Baka-Updates. Sankarea (that is going to get an anime adaptation soon) is, as you know, a rather popular clichè romance manga series with a zombie twist in it.
I immediately notice the average ranking to be 8.7 at the time of writing of this blog post, something a bit higher than my thought of the series, but still within the limits of reasons. The problem start as soon as you start watching in detail to the votes given by the various readers.
We have 250 votes as 10/10 and well 5 votes as 1/10 and while I can agree there may be different tastes around the world something is definitely out-of-place here.
What is 1/10 in a ranking? For me 1/10 must be totally worthless piece of content devoid of any interest, with crappy art, crappy characters and many others faults to the point of making it unreadable.
To now, no anime or manga series got an 1 from me, simply because there isn't a single production without a single positive side to it. Even if the whole outlook is bleak, I never really gave less than a 4/10 to a particular anime or manga series till now.
I tried to understand the reasoning of these people ranking a particular anime or manga series to the bare minimum and I got some answer in some particular comment on another series. They are making this decision because "there are too many unnecessary 10 so I need to take down the average"!
Am I the only one thinking that this is a very childish and at the same time useless thing. Yes, useless because any random surfer (like me) who is just searching for opinions on a particular anime/manga/visual novel series just get disoriented and avoid taking seriously these votes?!
Unfortunately this kind of behaviour is true for the opposite as well, there are user rankings filled with 10/10 everywhere on every kind of series. The ironical thing is that most of the times, the same people are voting 10/10 on most of these series.
10/10 that should mean "perfection" so there are two possible situation to consider. The first is that perfection in anime/manga/visual novels series is so common that pretty much hundreds of series reached it already or second, they are just spewing random garbage in these rankings!
When I rank a series, I am extremely careful to take into account all the various sides of a particular production without focusing too much on a particular one in order to give a subjective, but meaningful vote.
Kanokon (the series I ranked the lowest of the ones covered in this blog) has an awful story indeed, but the animation was quite good and had some nice voice-over as well. I ranked that as 6.3/10 in my rankings!
Unfortunately it seems that people around the net (including bloggers sometimes) prefer to just create fan-clubs to bash or praise to the utmost particular series without really giving a careful thought about what they're watching.
And you? What do you think about anime/manga/visual novels rankings on the internet? How do you actually rank a particular series?
See you soon,
feal87