I think one can draw a distinction between what you LIKE (subjective) vs what you think is GOOD (subjective but also somewhat objective), and separating the two isn’t all that difficult. Of course, your hivemind idea still applies; in the end, it comes down to whether you want your reviews to be more objective and have broader appeal (with the risk of being biased by your (mis)perception of others’ perceptions), or more subjective and thus truer to yourself, but likely to only appeal to a very select audience with similar interests to you.
Hmmm… not to pick sides or anything… 
I think reviewing things falls into three categories: commentary, factual, and fractual. Sorta like the news really.
A factual review just gives the plain facts. How many CG pictures are in it. How many tracks of music. Who are the characters. A summary of the plot. Who wrote the story and drew the artwork. How much was spent on the budget. So forth and so on. Stuff that no one can argue against, because it’s the hard truth.
Fractual is stuff like how many hours does it take to finish. If the artwork is high quality or low quality. If the music sounds good. If the voice actors are decent or outstanding. This is information that’s opinionated, because it can be argued against under circumstances, but information that more or less hits 51% of the mark. Stuff the majority would agree with it, and not find significant fault or call lies.
Commentary is totally opinion based, or is something that a large number could disagree with. For example that the eroge has the greatest plot ever written. That the twincest sex beats all the other sex hands down. That the main heroine had a better ending than the support heroines. Stuff of that sort. People who agree with you, will agree with you. Those who do not, will argue. Those sitting on the fence, will just smile and absorb the argument.
Factual reviews are good and all, but they don’t tell you anything you wouldn’t glean from the official site, thus really aren’t reviews a person wants if they’re still undecided on a title. The hardcore will get it; those who hate it will not. Fractual is the closest a personal review would get without be considered overtly biased, but doesn’t give what that reviewer personally thinks of a title. Just their prospective of what measure they use to rate something. Commentary gives you a full opinion on the matter, but may not appeal to everyone, and is utterly subjective to that person’s tastes and dislikes.
I think a good review uses all three, but makes certain to put a distinction between fractual and commentary. It’s okay to have a person feeling about something, so long as you are aware of your own bias, and let others know that those bias exist. I love twincest and dark gothic eroge for example, so I tend to view them higher that other types… I don’t try to hide that and hope people are aware of it, so they know where I’m coming from when I call this title awesome or that title trash.
That’s just me though¬Ö and this entire post is probably a commentary. 
I know a few people who don’t like Evangelion. Most people who have seen it think it’s awesome. Now, in my mind, saying “I can appreciate how well-made this is, it just doesn’t appeal to me” is different than saying “this sucks”. Likewise, everyone has guilty pleasures: things they rate higher than they “should”.
To me, someone who says Evangelion sucks is wrong. Someone who says they didn’t like Eva, but the music was good, the characters were well-written in a way that pissed them off (which is actually more or less the objection I heard from one my friends), etc. - that’s different. In that sense, a game which you can tell is good, but which does not appeal to you, should still get a good score, because the score is supposed to reflect your opinions AND the factual basis for those opinions.
Just have to disagree here. There are those that disagree even with Evangelion on a production basis. Many people have had an issue with the writing and the characters (not in the well-written yet pissed off way either), and I have even heard complaints on the music and animation… I don’t personally understand those last two all that much. So stating that the show sucks is not wrong… well, unless somone is running around saying “it sucks and that is fact”, but then saying the opposite is just as bad.
To get back on topic for a bit though …
Come on, Peter. You need to actually fix the issues with the translation. I have been holding back my purchase to wait for the patch, but now I’m hearing it didn’t actually fix the problem.
If the story is not given the treatment it deserves, then you are down to judging the game purely by its ero standards. And purely on those grounds, Family Project’s graphics are outdated, h-ovas are animated, and I can buy them for half the price of your game. The story is the defining feature of your products, what makes them different than everything else out there. Without that, there’s no reason at all to buy your stuff versus Kitty Media’s DVD products.
Shoddy translations and an apathetic doesn’t-really-matter attitude* are penny-wise, pound-foolish.
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- This is a bit harsh, but if issues that were specifically brought up to Peach Princess staff, when they specifically asked what needed to be fixed - were in fact not fixed, it’s hard to avoid this conclusion.
With Kazokei’s translation still not so good, I think it forebodes ill for Nitro+ games, considering how they’re story-centred. I mean, two years work, two months patch + claims it was a top priority project? You’d expect it to be quite perfect. 
I think FP:KK was jsut translated by a large number of different translators at several different intervals. At least that’s the way it seems to me.
None of the other games I have from JAST have anything near as bad a translation as FP:KK. Most of them are quite good, with only minor errors and inconsistancies. The later titles such as Princess Waltz and Snow Sakura have excellent translations. So for now, I will consider FP:KK an anomoly.
What’s more worrying is that they said they were working on a patch to fix the problems, and the patch didn’t really fix anything. The patch was so bad I hashed my file to make sure it was actually the one included in the patch. I thought I somehow forgot to patch it. That’s a pretty bad sign.
You’d think they try to fix their highest profile game before releasing others, but I guess it’s not a priority for them.
They really should just open-source the text engine and let us fans do the patch work.
I’m getting the feeling that nobody seems to know that it is just a preliminary
If you go to jastusa’s homepage and click on the MOERO OFFICIAL SITE ONLINE under News & Announcements. It saids on the very bottom that the patch is only a preliminary, and a final version is still in the works
Er, that’s an odd heading to put news about Family Project under. Particularly because Moero attracts the same kind of fans as Family Project. :roll:
Good to hear. I guess I should reserve judgement until the full patch comes out. If this is a preliminary patch, I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if all they did was remove "It’s over 9000’.
But if this one was a preliminary patch to fix “minor issues”, is the next one a “major overhaul” or just more “minor touch-ups”? Absent some official comment, there is the possibility that the final patch isn’t going to be much different than this one.
Even if this was a preliminary patch, why did it take 2 months? The amount of work they did could have been done in a day. It’s not like it’s a binary change, where they have to retest everything.
Due to discussion (hopefully/maybe) about certain changed elements of the game that are raising a fair bit of discussion on the forums and in the fanbase and more likely due to scheduling of internal resources.
Well at least this gives me an excuse to delay playing KK and get caught up on Umineko.
In addition to the fact that Family Project isn’t the only game in JAST USA’s pipeline, for Family Project they need to send the materials to Japan to obtain a build from the Japanese company. Considering that CD BROS hasn’t been quite “alive” for years, I wouldn’t be surprised if the round-trip time for the build took weeks.
Don’t you mean “companies of the Yuuto Group”? 
Technically, Kazokei is D.O.'s, not CD-BROS. As for the Yuuto Group itself, one may argue that ZyX is somewhat alive~
…though not much. OTOH, D.O. itself has been dead for years as well so your point stands.