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GAME: Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns

Metacritic compiles the reviews of multiple sources, generally the most well known ones, so they are not cherry picking, and gives you a fairly reasonable assessment of where the game really stands.

I don't see why people still bother with them. So many companies have been caught and admitted to paying and bribing people over the years you'd think the average gamer would stop clinging to their words so much.

Ignoring your ole internet saw of "reviews are bought and paid for" to focus on the more important point: it is a gross misappropriation of the term "slut shaming" to apply it to a fictional character, in a game made largely by men, who exists largely for the purpose of acting as a paper doll for a mostly-male audience to play dress-up with. I mean, this is the game whose pre-release coverage included over-eager developers borderline drooling over how they'd increased Lightning's cup size.

It's complicated, and there are blurred lines, but ultimately Lightning is not a person, she's a character. Denigrating a person for dressing up as Lightning does in the game is a problem; discussing how Lightning dresses in the game, how those clothes reflect the viewpoint of the developers and the audience, and whether these clothes empower Lightning or they're meant for cheap audience thrills at the cost of her character is not slut shaming.

Please give me at least 3 examples where companies were actually caught bribing game reviewers.

People like you throw this out there like it's 100% fact but the only example anyone ever points to is Jeff Gerstmann being ousted from Gamespot due to his bosses being horrible and caving to advertiser pressure. None of the people responsible for that fiasco still work there.

Somehow this one incident turned into "every review is bought and paid for, countless companies have been caught bribing game critics". It's a completely self-serving notion that "gamers" cling to because it invalidates any opinion written that isn't their own. Super annoying. You are effectively lying.

EA and Microsoft are doing it right now with Xbox One around the web and paying for positive reviews and publicity from Machina partners on YouTube. I mean, I always knew those kinds of Let's Play YouTubers were mostly staged and fake to begin with, but yeah, it's just kind of proof of it now that they have come forward and went 'Yeah, we were paid to praise it and hype these games/systems' and saying how common practice it is. I wonder if that's why JonTron left GameGrumps with seeing how commercialized GameGrumps have becomed shortly after he left.

As a general rule I take any site/review that also has advertisements plastered all over it with a grain of salt. Same way when I see game reviewers being hired to play/voice characters in games. That kind of stuff just sends a very big conflict of interest flag up to me.

Though I'm not sure how many are 'paid reviews' and how many are 'hype reviews'. I'm kinda surprised Gamespot went back and lowered the score of Bioshock Infinite to a 4/10 after the hype died down. I remember when it first came out anyone who said anything negative about it got called out as just doing it to be contrarian. Wonder how many reviewers just give good scores to games in fear of fan backlash.

How many times has it happened where you had probable cause to suddenly suspect all reviews of being bought and paid for because the person who had the speaking role then also actually wrote the review?

How many times has that actually happened, where someone who reviews games for a living had a speaking role in a game? How many times has it happened where you had probable cause to suddenly suspect all reviews of being bought and paid for because the person who had the speaking role then also [i]actually wrote the review

So my question is, did you deliberately misinterpret or misrepresent that situation just to further your point? Did you not see all those disclaimers and labels of "SECOND TAKE"? Did you not understand that they weren't changing the original score, which was a 9?

There's no real evidence anyone points to - it's all vague half-truths, rumors, "feelings" and stuff that's been accepted as truth among the internet forum crowd not because there's any evidence to back it up, but because they want to believe it.

As Zac says, citing Youtubers as your only concrete evidence of collusion is hardly a smoking gun, given that the way Youtubers operate has basically nothing in common with professional sites. I can't imagine there's more than a handful of Youtubers with any actual editorial oversight.