God of War: Ragnarok releases tomorrow, and reviews have been available for a few days now. They’re mostly glowing, including mine. I really liked the game a lot, and I think its stellar writing and smart, subtle tweaks to its combat really help drive a game that is much better than its predecessor.
However, not everyone liked it quite as much as I did. Sanghyun Bae, a critic from IGN Korea filed a God of War: Ragnarok review that gave the game a 6/10 score. Among the scores on the game’s Metacritic page, it’s certainly an outlier, one that had the unfortunate effect of pulling the game’s overall Metacritic score down a few points. It’s also by no means a bad score — 6 on the IGN Korea scale translates to Okay. Some of Bae’s critiques, particularly the translated quote that Metacritic and Open Critic had used to spotlight his review, unfavourably compared the game to DLC for the 2018 original rather than a new, standalone game.
Nevertheless, many in the industry saw Bae’s score among the others on Metacritic and winced, knowing what was about to happen. The price you pay as a games critic for having a contrary opinion on a major, massively hyped video game is targeted harassment because nobody can be cool and normal about anything on the internet.
Bae has spent the days since his article went live receiving death threats from die-hard fans. Death threats. Over a 6/10 review score, on a video game that they haven’t even played yet. It’s the score and the DLC quote most of his detractors seem to be taking issue with, threatening both him and IGN for running his review in the first place.
For his part, Bae isn’t even a full-time staff member at IGN. He wrote the review as a “guest critic”, which I assume means he is a freelancer.
As the vitriol poured in, Bae took to his Twitter account to explain a couple of points around the DLC quote that drew so much ire.
I didn’t check the translation on OpenCritic(It’s the job of editorial department), and people mentioned it was an insult, so I checked. And I found that it was translated in a more provocative direction, and it has just been revised. I’m sorry to make you see bad expressions. pic.twitter.com/QM1d90aKhR
— Bae Sang Hyun (@innobaetion) November 6, 2022
Bae also posted several tweets showing messages he’d received from angry fans, mocking his appearance and his writing abilities, all the way up to open death threats. I won’t repost those there due to the pretty horrific sentiments they convey, but you can find them pretty easily on his Twitter account if you would like to see them.
So, in the end, it seems like all of this was borne out of a mistranslation. Whether it was tweaked for extra spice or not, the quote from Bae’s own review was not, it seems, totally accurate. And for this, he has been harassed and pilloried online. Once again, the people doing the harassing have not played the game yet, they’ve just bought into the hype.
The final point I want to make before I wrap this up: a wide range of scores is a good thing! Reading reviews from a range of different critics, especially when those reviews have wildly different scores, is the entire point of the reviews process. It’s to give you a clear idea of what to expect from this Unit Of Entertainment you are thinking about purchasing. You should be reading multiple reviews on every game you’re interested in playing. You should be reading the ones with good scores and the ones with bad scores because that’s how you form a rounded idea of what the experience is actually like, and if you might enjoy it. The idea that, because the majority opinion on God of War: Ragnarok is positive, no one else can find it lacking, is laughable.
Personally, though I don’t agree with Bae’s assessment of the game, I have immense respect for both his willingness to write it and for IGN Korea’s willingness to run it. Good games crit arms the audience with a wide spectrum of opinion. Bae has done his job, and he’s done it very well indeed. You can read the original in full right here. You can also find a translated English version courtesy of Google Translate (which Bae says provides the closest translation to his words) right here.
God of War: Ragnarok is a video game. You can play it tomorrow.
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