Anyone who tells you that being a reviewer is easy only needs to point to the case of Bae Sang Hyun.
As the review embargo on God of War: Ragnarok lifted, critics got a chance to publish their thoughts on the upcoming God of War sequel ahead of its launch today, November 9.
As expected, most of the reviews sang Ragnarok’s praises, which was enough to make it one of the highest-rated games of the year and of all time. It’s not enough to vault it past the original game from 2018 but it’s as good as it gets.
However, it appears that the sequel didn’t make fans of everyone. Bae Sang Hyun gave Ragnarok a 6/10 score and fans were having none of it. It came to a point that the Korean author received death threats for his “negative review” and he had to take to Twitter to clarify his thoughts on the game.
After likening Ragnarok to a DLC for the 2018 title rather than a standalone game, Bae took the brunt of the collective frustration of Ragnarok’s fanbase.
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
It’s unfortunate that Bae had to suffer from death threats and harassment just for doing his job. As a critic, Bae should feel safe enough to publish what he thinks of a game even if it contradicts popular opinion.
It’s incidents like these that validate concerns about the prevalent cancel culture of today.
It’s worth noting that Bae’s thoughts are valid even if we don’t necessarily agree with them. Reading reviews from different critics with conflicting perspectives is the entire point of the exercise. It’d be pretty boring if every reviewer said the same thing about games.
We should thank people like Bae for bravely doing their job and being willing to give us a new view on things. We should read good and bad reviews of anything we want before buying it, if we want to get the full picture of what we’re about to get ourselves into.
Just because God of War: Ragnarok is great for mostly everyone doesn’t mean that no one else can find flaws in it.
In other news, God of War: Ragnarok will reportedly make PS4s run very loud.
