Contrary to what hordes of western gamers believe, people don't "pay" Famitsu for a specific review score. I know this because I have dinner with Famitsu guys once a week.
It's more like, a company pays Famitsu "protection money" -- in other words, they pay them to review their games, period. Famitsu -- and most of Japanese journalism, in fact -- is basically just vanity PR. And proud of it!
The editors of Famitsu are, to a certain extent, deeply entrenched in the most fascinating role-playing games of their lives. Sure, it's a love of games that gets them to apply for the job. However, once "in", they must play the "role" of a person who is batshit nuts in love with the very idea of videogames. The guys at Famitsu, however, are usually such resiliently affable personalities that they can do this job and still provide hilarious conversation at dinners where they are not even drunk (yet).
That, and let's face it -- games like Sonic have creepily devoted fans who are even more devoted than, say, James. In other words, they are blinded by their love for Sonic. Or Final Fantasy, or Kingdom Hearts. The chief purpose of the "MOST WANTED" poll in each week's issue can be assumed, then, to be to gauge what games the readers do not want to receive a low score. The readers who vote in that poll are the people who buy the magazine, read it cover to cover, and chatter endlessly on 2ch about it.
When Famitsu rates a game high, they do it out of respect for the readers -- avid players of Kingdom Hearts as most of them are. Avid players of Kingdom Hearts don't want to be told what Famitsu really thinks of their fucking piece of shit hobby. So Famitsu awards the "courtesy score" -- which used to be all nines and a ten, and is now all tens and a nine. When Famitsu KNOWS a game is going to sell 2 million copies in a week regardless of what they say, this is what they do.
You can try to refute the above paragraph. However, you will not be successful!
Famitsu is still very careful about perfect scores. No matter what, readers will bawl when a perfect score is given. They will be either overjoyed or deeply angry. Final Fantasy XII's perfect score, to look at 2ch, was "the biggest debacle in the history of the magazine". No. FFXII was a game that made giant, drastic, sweeping attempts to change a genre. Famitsu made a conscious decision to give it a perfect score, despite the game not being perfect. They wanted to send a message -- a gentle one -- "Please make an honest attempt to like this game better than those other games." It's very noble of them.
Yet Famitsu makes more money off the back cover advertisement than off all the newsstand sales combined (they offer no subscription service). What Famitsu is -- and you wouldn't know this unless you've held a heavy issue in your hand on a tired Friday morning -- is straightforward (if not entirely honest) PR in a pretty, meaty, high-quality bundle. It's an advertisement feast. If the western concepts of "journalistic integrity" are distorted and twisted within its pages, they're done so very lovingly. Because, you see, that degree of over-thinking really doesn't exist here. You can cry "viral!!!!!!!!!!!!" and "TEH PAID!!!!!!!!!!" all you want at Famitsu's features and articles. However, you can't change that it's a hell of a thing to look at on the train on Friday morning, or at lunch on Friday afternoon; it provides stimulating topics of conversation (for geekos) over Friday dinner.
The people who read Famitsu are not brainwashed by the contents of the magazine. They take it in, shrug some of it off, and form their own opinions on the fly. Whether they're enlightened about the finer points of its making or not, they are always suspicious of the fact that they can think for themselves. It's a free country, and a free world, et cetera.
In the US, gaming journalism has been struggling for respectability, trying their hardest to be taken seriously by the rest of the country. They do everything they can do not be seen as biased, they try to be objective and sometimes even antagonistic in their reviews and interviews.
There is, however, an exception
Play Magazine
Yesterday evening I forgot my PSP at the office and had finished earlier that morning, the book that I had brought along to read (Timothy Zahn's Star Wars: Allegiance), so i swung into the magazine store and saw a copy of the latest Issue of Play. I haven't read Play in a long time (at least a year) so i figured why not? Then I started flipping though. The first thing that caught my eye was the glut of below-average games getting high marks... and for very odd reasons. Like Star Wars: Lethal Alliance (61 metascore) got a 7.5, citing "a female lead" as the first entry in the "pros" section. Even the interviews... hell, especially the interviews were heavily layered in PR-style fluff. The questions were always phrased like "This game is absolutely amazing, how did you cram this much Amazing onto a single disk?" It almost felt like i was reading an infomercial. I felt embarrassed for the interviewer. But then it clicked.
They were trying to pull a Famitsu.
It was very much like that wonderful moment when you realize that the shitty movie you are watching is actually going for pure camp; and so you begin to have fun with it. Suddenly i felt free to enjoy the bright, colorful pages filled with ridiculous hype and overblown scores unhindered by the limitations of "journalistic integrity." I must confess, once I released Play from such conventions, I had the first American gaming mag experience that brought back fond memories of Famitsu.
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