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REVIEW: Bizenghast GN 1


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ACDragonMaster



Joined: 23 Aug 2004
Posts: 405
PostPosted: Sat Dec 24, 2005 3:19 pm Reply with quote
deathbringer wrote:
I like romance, I just thought the story in this case was crap.


Yes, and "crap" tells us oh so much of exactly what makes it so poor, doesn't it? Certainly more than citing specific examples or even scanning samples to show...



deathbringer wrote:
Which is part of my issue with the review. I thought it was fairly original, and told fairly well. Waits for someone with a degree in english to chime in


*raises eyebrow* I'm majoring in English, what about it? The review states that the comic is subpar, and explains exactly what makes it such. And I believe I've already explained how "unoriginal" doesn't have to mean "bad", the same way "original" doesn't necessarily mean "good".

Of course, I usually defer to others' judgment on the "originality" issue because, frankly, with as much as I read it's rare for me to find anything that I haven't seen done in some way somewhere else before. I'm more about how it's done, and the review does explain in what ways the comic is apparently done poorly.

deathbringer wrote:
Until this thread I'd never heard of anyone reviewing a book based on it's technical aspects. (Well, not for an anime website anyways.) Every other review I've ever read can be boiled down to one thing: Whether the reviewer liked it or not. I'm sure there's some books that have the technical aspects down perfect, but still get low reviews because, well, they're crap. I just get the impression that some people feel they are much more then a reviewer for an anime website.


Actually, the point of a review IS to try to be more subjective. Anyone can go and say "this sucks" or "that rocks", but a good reviewer goes all the way to try to describe the pros and cons and weigh them against each other. I occasionally post reviews of sorts of various anime and manga on my journal, and when I do I attempt to describe as much of the technical merits and flaws as possible, though I admittedly often do a poor job and end up gushing whenever it's a series I particularly liked. Which is why I keep such things confined to there where they can be taken as personal opinion, rather than a professional site or publication or such. While I don't always agree with the reviews posted on ANN, most of the time they are fairly professional about it.

deathbringer wrote:
Yes it is. It's a review. All he's doing is giving his thoughts on the book. He's not going into deep analytical discussion of the book, or teaching a class, it's just his opinion.


Again, it's because it's a review that it's not just a bunch of "this is such a great book!!!" or "this is crap I wish I never read it!!!" or such. It gives the pros and cons from the technical perspective, a little colored by the opinion of the particular reviewer. But it's not fundamentally an opinion piece- while often a reviewer does at some point state their opinion, the purpose of a review is to give an accurate representation of what the work is like, so that people can get an idea before seeing/reading it themselves. Many people read movie reviews to get an idea of whether or not they'll like a movie, how could it be possible to judge this if a review is just a bunch of opinion as you claim? But it's not, so that's a moot point anyway.

Oh, heck, just go look up the word "review" in the dictionary sometime.
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deathbringer



Joined: 21 Aug 2004
Posts: 276
PostPosted: Sat Dec 24, 2005 8:12 pm Reply with quote
HitokiriShadow wrote:
While reviews are going to contain opinions, that does not neccesarily exlude facts or objective observations.


That I have no problem with. If I was given a choice between reading a review and reading a summary, I'd pick the summary every time.

ACDragonMaster wrote:
Many people read movie reviews to get an idea of whether or not they'll like a movie, how could it be possible to judge this if a review is just a bunch of opinion as you claim?


I don't know. Honestly, I've never based my decision to see or read something on someone else's review. I rarely ever read reviews, because really it's not relevant. The only thing that matters to me when deciding to see something is if I want to see it. I don't care if a guy with a masters in flim says that a movie is going to the best movie of the year, if it doesn't look interesting to me, I'm not going to see it.
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HitokiriShadow



Joined: 09 May 2005
Posts: 6251
PostPosted: Sat Dec 24, 2005 11:15 pm Reply with quote
deathbringer wrote:

ACDragonMaster wrote:
Many people read movie reviews to get an idea of whether or not they'll like a movie, how could it be possible to judge this if a review is just a bunch of opinion as you claim?


I don't know. Honestly, I've never based my decision to see or read something on someone else's review. I rarely ever read reviews, because really it's not relevant.


Well, that explains this:

Quote:
Until this thread I'd never heard of anyone reviewing a book based on it's technical aspects. (Well, not for an anime website anyways.) Every other review I've ever read can be boiled down to one thing: Whether the reviewer liked it or not.


You make generalizations about reviews, but you've barely read any yourself.
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deathbringer



Joined: 21 Aug 2004
Posts: 276
PostPosted: Sun Dec 25, 2005 1:35 am Reply with quote
HitokiriShadow wrote:
deathbringer wrote:

ACDragonMaster wrote:
Many people read movie reviews to get an idea of whether or not they'll like a movie, how could it be possible to judge this if a review is just a bunch of opinion as you claim?


I don't know. Honestly, I've never based my decision to see or read something on someone else's review. I rarely ever read reviews, because really it's not relevant.


Well, that explains this:

Quote:
Until this thread I'd never heard of anyone reviewing a book based on it's technical aspects. (Well, not for an anime website anyways.) Every other review I've ever read can be boiled down to one thing: Whether the reviewer liked it or not.


You make generalizations about reviews, but you've barely read any yourself.


I didn't make any generalizations. I said I'd never heard of anyone reviewing a book based on it's technical aspects. Me. And I don't read very many reviews, but every other review I've read has boiled down to whether the reviewer liked it or not.
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor


Joined: 05 Jan 2002
Posts: 7912
Location: Anime News Network Technodrome
PostPosted: Mon Dec 26, 2005 7:27 pm Reply with quote
deathbringer wrote:

I don't know. Honestly, I've never based my decision to see or read something on someone else's review. I rarely ever read reviews, because really it's not relevant. The only thing that matters to me when deciding to see something is if I want to see it. I don't care if a guy with a masters in flim says that a movie is going to the best movie of the year, if it doesn't look interesting to me, I'm not going to see it.


You've gone on record to say that someone having an education on any given topic, a degree or any vast amount of knowledge does not make their opinion on that topic "more valid" than yours; clearly you respect noone's opinion but your own, and you refuse to listen to anyone who actually does have a education outright.

If you don't like reviews, don't care what the reviewer is saying and their experience/education/knowledge mean absolutely nothing to you, stop reading reviews and don't take it upon yourself to criticise the review because you clearly have zero interest in them in the first place.

Your condescending "clearly this person thinks they're more than just an anime reviewer on a website" is one of the nastiest things I've heard anyone say about the staff on this site.

Do me a favor: don't like our reviews? Don't care what we have to say? Don't read the reviews then. See? Problem solved. Now you can stop slinging mud at people who disagree with you and insulting anyone who dare tell you that they might know something about this subject because they have a college education in the matter. Enough.

This thread is annoying and tiresome. Locked.
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