On Reviews and Scores

Note: I will be talking primarily about the anime community in this post and most of the terms used in this post will consequently reflect that, but I'm assuming it refers to reviewers of other media as well. If you want to replace every usage of "show" or "series" with "game" or "franchise" in your mind, please do so.

Part 1: On Why People Are Doing Reviews Wrong

The popular review style in the anime community seems to be to give a number for story, art, sound, characters, and enjoyment, and then average these scores into an overall score. I have no clue where exactly people came up with this format. I suspect that they stole it from Tristan "Arkada" Gallant, whose "Glass Reflections" is one of the more popular shows out there. If I recall correctly, Arkada himself swiped that from a friend, but said friend may have gotten it somewhere else. So I don't really know who came up with it. It doesn't really matter, because the entire system is bogus and bullshit anyway.


Reviews are always going to be tricky things, because they attempt to give an objective value to things that are generally fairly subjective. Maybe you hate a show's art or animation style, so you dock it points for that. But there are other people who might love it. Inferno Cop has atrocious animation, but for some, that's the appeal of the show. I think that the character designs in Seitokai Yakuindomo look terrible, but I'm sure that some people like them. Humor is a similarly subjective thing. To go back to Seitokai Yakuindomo, I've never gotten past an episode or two because I feel like just having "haha, sex!" as the punchline isn't clever and is just a cheap way of getting laughs. Other people love the show, though, so my opinion isn't going to matter to them. Every one of those categories is going to involve subjectivity. Not everyone is going to agree on everything.

And yet, those categories are often scored on 10-point--or even 100-point--scales (note: they will try to hide the fact that they are 100-point scales by using decimals. Do not be fooled. If the score includes an 8.1, that's actually 81/100). They use these scales because, presumably, the more granular your score is, the more accurate it must be. If you're giving a show an 8.3 instead of an 8.2, people assume you've done some serious research. After all, that extra .1 point must have come from somewhere. There's no way that the decision was arbitrary, right?

This is the biggest lie that review scores tell. The thing that both reviewers and people who read reviews seem to be unaware of is that a larger review scale makes scores less objective, not more. By adding more nuance to scoring, you introduce more subjectivity.

I've always hated 10-point scales because they feel arbitrary to me. In practice, people generally only use a few of the numbers anyway. Instead of 5/10 being average, anything that gets a 5/10 is generally seen as really bad. Everyone has a different definition of what a 10-point scale means. Sometimes, people will be willing to use all 10 numbers, at which point they get called out for being too strict. Other times, they inflate scores and avoid giving anything below a 7, which is how you end up with all those "10/10, it's okay" jokes that people add at the end of their reviews on Steam or what have you.

So stop doing this thing where you divide shows into several elements and give them all subjective ratings. All you're doing is making the review less clear and less cohesive. If you tell me that a show's story gets an 8, its art gets a 7, its sound gets a 6, the characters get a 7, and your personal enjoyment is an 8, that tells me literally nothing about the show. If the soundtrack is lackluster, does that mean that the rest of the elements are dragged down by it? Are entertaining characters enough to save a boring plot? None of these scores tell me whether the show as a whole is good or bad, so averaging them for some grand final score isn't going to tell me anything either.

Part 2: On How To Evaluate A Series Correctly

I think that a good reviewer will approach every series a bit differently, because not all shows can be compared to each other. Some of my favorite anime include JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, The Tatami Galaxy, Silver Spoon, and Nichijou, but I love all of them for wildly different reasons and I can't really say "this one is better than this one because it did X better."

Ultimately, to determine a show's quality, you need to start with this key question: What is this show trying to do, and did the show do it correctly? First, identify the purpose of a show. Is it supposed to make you think? Does it exist to provide an emotional, cathartic release? Is it just meant to be fun and entertaining? Once you've identified the purpose, evaluate how well it's able to live up to that. This is probably going to be a good indicator of what your final verdict is going to be.

After that, don't look at the same elements every time and give them a grade. Look at the show's strengths and look at its weaknesses. What's going to draw people to the show, and what's going to turn them away? And since these aren't always mutually exclusive, be sure to look at the elements that could be hit-or-miss. The fourth season of Arrested Development, for example, drastically changed the structure so that each episode focused on a single character, showing what they had been up to for the past few years and only gradually revealing how they were related. Some people (myself included) thought that this was a fantastic and innovative structure. Others hated it.

Reviews can be structured, but I feel like this hampers a review. It backs you into a corner that you won't allow yourself to deviate from. If you're only going to focus on certain types of shows, that's one thing, and with something like a video game, I understand that gameplay, story, visuals, etc. should all probably at least be touched on. But if you limit your structure, you're limiting your ability to experiment. I enjoy different things for different reasons. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is exciting and inspiring. Mushishi is ethereal and calming. You need to bring those attitudes with you into your review.

In addition, you'll also have biases, and you need to bring those into your review as well. Yes, it means you're not being as objective, but you're going to have biases anyway, so you may as well be up front about them. I can't explain why I think that Silver Spoon is so great without touching on how I grew up in a farming community or that I spent time in rural Hokkaido. I can't talk about Welcome to the NHK without explaining how I was in a situation uncomfortably close to the protagonist's and how the message of "if you continue down this downward path, necessity will eventually force you to get a job or die" that the show gave me was actually somehow disturbingly encouraging and exactly what I needed to hear.

Every show is different, so you need to approach every show differently. Maybe a popular show needs to be taken down a peg. Maybe you need to hype up an underappreciated gem. Whatever it is, don't limit yourself to a restrictive style. Especially when that style is stolen from other people and requires you to give scores you don't know how to give to aspects that you don't know much about. Seriously, you don't want me talking about animation and direction because my reasoning for a score will always boil down to "I dunno, I thought it looked good."

Part 3: On Alternative Methods of Scoring

Don't.


No, seriously, you don't have to give something a score. All you need to do is explain what does or doesn't work. How you talk about a show is more important than actually scoring it. This also means that you have to actually have substance to your reviews, though. I've seen certain reviewers talk for minutes without actually saying anything of value.

But hey, some people feel like they can't break free of a rating system, so here are some other options.

 I've seen a lot of scales represented in more practical terms, such as "buy it, rent/stream it, skip it." I like ideas like that. But no matter what you end up doing, make sure that you, at very least, have some sort of rubric that you judge shows on. Have a way to describe each of your ratings and why a show would fit into them. Know who you would recommend a show to and why. Know who you wouldn't recommend it to.

As for systems themselves, start with a three-point system. Define things as good, neutral, or bad. If that's not something that works for you, expand it to a five-point system (the one I personally use) so that you can reward something that has that masterpiece quality to it, or to condemn something for being amateurish or downright offensive.

If you really want to add more nuance, try letter grades. That preserves the 5-point "terrible, bad, average, good, fantastic" scale in the form of A, B, C, D, and F, but it also allows you to add a + or - to say "I'm a bit on the fence about my rating."

If you're forced into a system you don't like, tweak a system that you do like so that it applies to it. Sometimes I do reviews on sites that force me to give a rating on a 100-point scale. I personally scale it so that I'm rating by intervals of 5, removing 100 (I could give a perfect score if I wanted but on a scale that granular I don't feel comfortable doing so) and 0 (everything at least deserves 5 points for existing). Then I divide it so that I know roughly where each series is going to fall. For example, 70-75 defines a good show that more people than not will enjoy, while 40-45 is more of a "guilty pleasure" show. I use benchmarks like this to define my entire scale, making it easier to give a rating that isn't as arbitrary.

In review (pun intended), don't make your scale bigger because you think it will make the review more objective. Don't feel like you have to structure yourself. Write a review because it's the right approach to take with a show. Look at the show relative to its peers rather than some nonexistant universal constant.

And please, whatever you do, don't score shows by averaging six categories. Seriously. That's stupid. Stop it.

Psycho-Pass 2 Review

It's been too long since I've written something for this blog, and while I have maybe four or five half-finished posts that I haven't published yet because I plan to put more effort into them, I figured I'd toss off a quick anime review.

Let's talk about Psycho-Pass. Psycho-Pass is is a 2012 original anime by Gen Urobuchi of Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Fate/Zero fame. Urobuchi is one of my favorite anime writers, and I thought Psycho-Pass was incredible. It's a dystopian world where something called the Sibyl System controls crime by monitoring people's mental state and their criminal tendencies. Think Minority Report meets Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It makes plenty of allusions to the works that it draws its inspiration from, from Plato to Shakespeare to Joseph Conrad and more. The series takes a look at what it means to be a human, how we should interact with a heavily digital society, and what relationship law and ethics should have.

Psycho-Pass 2, which aired in 2014, is basically Psycho-Pass devoid of everything that made it great. It lack's Urobuchi's involvement, which probably should have been the first red flag. But that didn't necessarily mean it would have been bad. Maybe it could have had a solid storyline and good characters. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, many of the best characters from the first season were dead or indisposed and most the other established characters had to be left alone so that they could be used in the then-upcoming movie (which Gen Urobuchi was involved with). So the story had to be carried by the new cast members. Which were, uh...pretty awful.

Without going into too much detail since it involves spoilers for the first season, most of the cast was well-established and had at least some purpose in the story. I've always thought that characters were Urobuchi's strongest points. He doesn't write easily-identifiable and fun caricatures like you see in lots of anime. His characters have some subtlety and nuance to them, and viewers have to work a bit harder to understand them, but can enjoy them more fully if they put in that effort.  The characters in PP2? They pretty much exist to drive the plot (which is...not great) or fill out the cast.

Of course, not all characters are necessarily bad at the beginning. At the beginning, I was still hopefully optimistic. Episode 4 is when I abandoned hope. A bunch of hostages are caught in a situation that causes their crime coefficients to rise to levels indicating that they are about to instigate violent crimes. Dominators, the weapons the police use, are set to stun and contain criminals at a certain level and set to kill at a certain level. It's a safety mechanism that protects the people so that lethal force isn't accidentally used. However, as these citizens all blindly rush out of the building in a panic, their crime coefficients elevated, the police massacre them all. Why is this happening? There's something highly abnormal about this. Have no situations like this ever happened before? One would think that the police have procedures for dealing with hostage situations in which victims might become temporarily stressed. But no, that scene needed to be there, because something needed to make she show feel edgy, since the new writer has confused that for being good.

The edginess continues through the series. One of the major plotlines is a villain in the force attempting to make Akane's psycho-pass darker. Why? What good does that do? Why Akane? There is literally no purpose to the plotline other than "it's dark."

Psycho-Pass 2 feels like a single arc of Psycho-Pass stretched out into 11 episodes. It had the potential to be good, but in order to fill time, it took far too long getting to the point, and when it finally did get to the point, the point turned out to contradict a lot of what had previously been established. In theory, the season boiled down to a variation of the God Paradox, i.e., "if God can do anything, can he create a boulder so heavy that he can't lift it?" In this case, the villain, Kamui, asked "if Sibyl is all-judging, how would it judge itself?"

In attempting to answer this question, Psycho-Pass 2 completely changes what "criminally asymptomatic" means, and gives a convoluted answer to the question in the process. The obvious answer, based on what the first season previously established, would be "it doesn't need to because Sibyl is the embodiment of the law and the law is above judgment." But Psycho-Pass 2 sets up a scenario where Sibyl fails to judge a man whose internal organs are a conglomerate of individuals, similar to how Sibyl itself operates. Let's ignore how absolutely stupid this is for a few moments and focus on how Sibyl reacts. Sibyl says "well, we'll judge each of the individuals that are part of you individually, and we'll also judge ourselves individually and eliminate the brains that are raising our crime coefficients." Except that shouldn't happen, because the Sibyl System consists of criminally asymptomatic brains that can't be judged by the Sibyl System. There should not be brains capable of raising its crime coefficient. But of course that shouldn't be surprising, since the writers of Psycho-Pass 2 seem to have no concept of what "criminally asymptomatic" means, considering that Togane is somehow considered criminally asymptomatic while simultaneously having the highest crime coefficient recorded. This is literally the opposite of what criminally asymptomatic has been established to mean. Criminally asymptomatic people have hues that don't match their actions. A murderer like season 1's Makishima is criminally asymptomatic because he has a clear psycho-pass, and I suppose a good person who somehow has a dark psycho-pass would also theoretically be criminally asymptomatic. But having a high crime coefficient is something you would expect from a character who killed puppies as a child. That's not hyperbole, by the way. There is a scene where we literally see Togane murdering puppies as a child. I mean, seriously? Is there a more heavy-handed yet also generic way to establish that he's evil?

Let's come back to our villain, Kamui: he was the only survivor of a plane crash as a child who was saved by surgery that put the organs of the other 184 students who did not survive the plane crash into his body. Let's ignore things like compatibility of blood types and just assume that this somehow works. The result is that he cannot be detected by the Sibyl System because...he's not one person or something. Also, the season is set up around this idea of judging a collective. A collective of brains is wholly different from a collective of organs. A collective of organs should not affect anything the show tries to portray it as affecting. People who have heart or kidney transplants do not undergo random personality changes because they have other people's organs in them. There's probably research to back this up, but I don't need it because it should be obvious to pretty much everyone that this very concept of this happening is absolutely fucking stupid.

So let's recap what exactly we've established with Psycho-Pass 2:
-It focuses more on being dark and edgy than making sense
-It contradicts things that have been previously established in the series
-It's built on a premise that is not only fallacious, but makes no logical sense, either.

There are plenty of other small things I could go into, but those three points alone are enough to condemn the show. Psycho-Pass was an incredibly thoughtful show that, despite sci-fi elements not necessarily grounded in reality, at least stayed consistent. Psycho-Pass 2 is basically Psycho-Pass devoid of everything that made Psycho-Pass good. Does that make Psycho-Pass 2 bad? I honestly can't tell, because I cannot divorce it from Psycho-Pass, and relative to Psycho-Pass, it's bad. But hey, at least Urobuchi's still involved in the movie! Hopefully it doesn't suck when it's finally released here.

Literature Reviews: Trader Tales by Nathan Lowell

Near the end of last school year I stumbled across Podiobooks, which are basically authors podcasting free audio versions of their books, dubbed “podiobooks” (I love how the term is a portmanteau of two other portmanteaus: podcast (iPod+broadcast) and audiobook (audio+book)).  That summer, since I do a lot of solitary outdoor work, I decided that doing some ear-reading would be a good alternative to talking to myself to pass the time.

One of the series I picked was Nathan Lowell’s Trader Tales series (or maybe Trader’s Tales or Traders’ Tales—Podiobooks labels it Trader Tales so that’s what I’m calling it for the sake of consistency).  What drew me to this series?  Why, the fact that it was one of the most highly-rated series on the site.  Because playing it safe is always more enjoyable than taking a chance, right?  Anyway, I also picked it because it was a longer series and would last me longer than some others would.

Trader Tales is a six-book long narrative chronicling the life of Ishmael Horatio Wang as he goes from a grunt on a spacefaring trade ship to the eventual owner of his own company.  That’s a bit of a spoiler, yes, but the titles make it clearly obvious.  Each of the six books (Quarter Share, Half Share, Full Share, Double Share, Captain’s Share, and Owner’s Share) make it obvious from the get-go that Ishmael is going places and the focused is moved from the “what” to the “when and how.”

The story starts with the death of Ishmael’s mother, a professor at a university on his home world.  Unfortunately for Ishmael, since he’s eighteen years old and living at the university with his mother is now out of the question, he’s forced offworld.  He’s able to solve his problems by taking a job aboard the Solar Clipper Lois McKendrick. There, he starts forming a kinship with his crewmates and quickly grows to love life in the “deep dark” and begins to learn the ins and outs of trading.  The overall story can be split pretty clearly in half.  The first three books focus on Ishmael as a young man aboard the Lois McKendrick, and the later three books focus on him as an older up-and-coming officer.  These later three books have less connectivity between them, as a fairly notable timeskip occurs between each and Ishmael changes ships and crew in each, but they still sort of form their own arc.  For that reason, I’m going to be talking about the plots of two halves of the series separately.

The first half of the story (Quarter Share, Half Share, and Full Share) has a solid plot, though the plot is actually fairly strange.  For the first two or three books, there really isn’t any sort of antagonist or even much of an antagonistic force.  The conflict is very low-risk and it feels more like a “slice-of-life” type of story.  In fact, it’s not until the the end of the second book that anything even really starts going wrong for Ishmael.  However, this doesn’t mean that it’s poorly written or unenjoyable.  Even with the lack of major conflict, there are a lot of solid story and character arcs that are built upon in later books, and I thoroughly enjoyed them.  In fact, the first few books were probably my favorites.

Instead of major conflict, we’re treated to Ishmael working in Lois’s galley, forming bonds with members of the crew, and forming a freelance trading partnership with his first and closest friend, Pip.  During this, Ishmael comes across as a bit of a golden boy, turning the ship upside down as he shows them his outsider way of doing things, as all the other crew members come from shipping families and he’s the only “land rat” on the crew.  It’s frequent to the point of being noticeable, but not to the point of being irritating.  Ishmael isn’t a genius or messiah; he just has a different perspective, is well-educated, and is very, very lucky.  There are three main story arcs through these first three books.  The first is about Ishmael and Pip organizing and launching a union for independent trading on the ship.  The second is Ishmael’s mission to become rated in all four disciplines (I have, unfortunately forgotten the actual term used in the book—basically, all jobs on a ship fall under one of these four disciplines).  The third is Ishmael’s developing relationships with three ladies: Beverly, Brillo, and Diane.

These arcs run throughout the first three books before ultimately coming to a conclusion at the end of the third.  The fourth book opens with Ishmael fresh out of an officer academy.  At this point, the entire cast changes, and much of the tone of the series does as well.  In the first half, Ishmael had nothing to lose. It became clear fairly quickly that he could get things done and therefore had some job security, he was making friends where he previously had few to none, and he was blessed with plenty of luck on top of that.  All responsibilities beyond his job were of his own choosing.  Double Share throws all that out the window, starting from the point that Ishmael graduates only around the middle of his class at the academy.  After all, perspective can only do so much, and while he has a sharp mind, he lacks the life experience others in his position would have grown up with.  From this point on, everything becomes an uphill battle for Ishmael.  The Lois was a healthy ship with a wonderful family of people, but Ishmael doesn’t end up so lucky when he finishes his education and returns to the deep dark.  His employer sees he has potential and tests it by putting him in high-risk situations where he has everything to lose.  When he manages to improve how one ship runs, he’s made captain of the worst ship in the fleet.  When he turns it around into one of the best, the company fires him to encourage him to start his own shipping company (they have their own reasons for doing so).

I could go into the individual plots of the second half of the series (consisting of Double Share, Captain’s Share, and Owner’s Share) more, but they aren’t as connected as the first three books and are consequently harder to briefly summarize.  These books also don’t require me to explain a lack of antagonists since they each have fairly tangible ones, so I think I’ll leave the plot summary as is and let you experience the story yourself.  I will say, however, that I felt the story of Ishmael Wang came to a satisfying conclusion.  His journey obviously isn’t over, but for now, it’s enough.  Lowell has expressed a desire to write other stories set in the same universe and has mentioned that we may see more of Ishmael and his old crewmates, and I’m personally looking forward to that.

The series also has some very strong characters—at least in the first half.  The characters in the second half are pretty strong, but they only get about a book or two of development each, and just don’t quite stand out as much as the characters in the first half do.  There are some standouts, of course, but almost all of my favorite characters were from the first half.  In fact, I was incredibly disappointed to see them go, and just a little angry that absolutely none of them even made cameos in the second half past an offhand mention.  The development of all characters is done well, though.  All the romantic relationships (as well as the non-romantic relationships, for that matter) feel like they develop naturally, and Ishmael’s mother is even posthumously developed through Ishmaels thoughts and reflections.

It’s worth mentioning that the entire series feels very true and real.  The universe is slowly developed and pretty much everything introduced evokes a “sure, I’ll buy that” reaction instead of a “this is clearly fantasy” reaction.  I don’t know how scientifically accurate it is, but it feels like it was well-researched, which is the part that really matters.  All the characters also feel like real people, and whenever something painful happens to Ishmael, the reader is left with a sort of “well, that’s life” feeling.

But moving past the writing itself, I want to talk about the audiobook format.  That is, after all, how I listened to it.  So it can be a good book, but if it’s a terrible audiobook, it won’t make much difference.  What’s worth noting is that the story was written specifically with audiobooks in mind, so it should be great as an audiobook, right?

First of all, Lowell’s reading is great.  Every podiobooker (is that a term?  It is now) has their own ways of doing the reading.  Patrick E. McLean, for example, does imitations of all his characters’ voices.  Philippa Ballentine enlists other podiobookers so that her novels have full voice acting.  The approach Lowell takes is the simple approach: he simply reads it.  It’s a first-person narrative, which lends itself to this approach well (the narrative and Ishmael’s voice are one and the same), but for other characters he doesn’t do much: just barely tweaks his tone of voice enough that we can tell it’s a character other than Ishmael who’s speaking.  It’s barely noticeable and doesn’t draw attention.

The story is also read very well.  Lowell puts plenty of emotion into the reading, and if he ever stumbles, it’s rarely.  He inflects properly where he needs to inflect, and will often do things like yawn as Ishmael talks about how tired he is or pause as the a revelation sinks into the characters’ minds.  It’s just a small things like that, but they draw you into the story just a little bit more, and I appreciated them.

The production of the audio files is top-notch.  This is not something that you would usually look for, but all it takes is one bad experience (sound not coming through both headphones, issues with volume, background noise, etc.) to make you appreciate it.  The music chosen is enjoyable, and always fades in and out smoothly.  One thing that I really liked about the first two or three books was that, at the beginning of each episode (not chapter; each episode contains several chapters), there is a brief “previously on” sort of segment that gave you a few passages of a sentence or two from the previous episode. It was unobtrusive and helped notify you if you had somehow gotten your files out of order (since mp3 players can be a bit wonky that way) or helped you find your place if you had stopped listening in the middle of an episode.  I don’t know why Lowell dropped these later, but I really wish he hadn’t.  It was something I had not seen in a podiobook up until that point, and I really appreciated it.

All in all, I give Traders Tales a glowing recommendation.  It’s a fascinating book with a solid story and Lowell performs a great read of it.  If you’re looking into podiobooks this is a great place to start.  Is it the best story I’ve ever read (ear-read?)?  Well…probably not.  I haven’t really mentioned many issues with the story.  I really don’t have many issues with the story, but I was listening to it out of the corner of my ear (that’s a phrase now) as I worked.  If I were to truly look hard, I could probably find all sorts of flaws with it like any jaded critic worth their salt.

However, Nathan Lowell is a small-time author, and as an aspiring author myself, I don’t think it would be beneficial to anyone to nitpick.  I do Lowell no service by deterring people from his work, I do all you readers no service by asking you to read about a series you’ve never heard of and then saying “by the way, it’s not worth it,” and I do myself no service by doing nobody any service.  The fact remains that, for such a small-time author, Lowell’s work is fantastic.  I don’t have a giant pool of podiobooks to compare it to, but the Trader Tales series were some of the best I heard and lasted me the longest.

So please, check out Trader Tales, especially if you’re interested in some entrepreneurship as the first books in the series give a lot of insight into the process.  I believe that Lowell is currently working on re-issuing the series and possibly releasing physical versions of the books.  For now, at least, the podiobooks are available for free, no strings attached, at the link I provided at the beginning of the post.  They’re very accessible books, even if you don’t like sci-fi, so give them a listen.  If you enjoy them, donate.  Or don’t and live with the guilt, I guess.  Support this wonderful small-time author by listening to his work and telling your friends.