The people who wrote that Cross Review don’t understand anything!

So says Ryoichi Hasegawa, the former Sonic Team and Naughty Dog dude whom I think I either drank with him once or attended his GDC panel, one of the two. Maybe both.

These days he’s back at Sega as their localization manager; his latest project,  House of the Dead: Overkill, comes out 9/17 in Japan. Famitsu gave the game straight 6′s in this week’s issue (a fair bit lower than the US/European reception), and Japanese blog My Game News Flash did an informal interview with him about it.

Hasegawa: Good to meet you. Let me get one thing out of the way: The House of the Dead: Overkill, coming out next week from our company, got straight 6′s in Famitsu’s Cross Review, but please don’t believe that.

Q: Boy, that’s rough. Is the game fun?

Hasegawa: Oh, of course it is. The people who wrote that review don’t get it! The four people who reviewed it don’t get what makes it fun at all!

Q: I saw a movie of it yesterday; was Biohazard and stuff like that a pretty big influence?

Hasegawa: It’s less Bio and more just really over-the-top — not silly, but just incredible. People speak English in this game, but the dialogue’s crazy; they say “fuck” enough to make it into Guinness. You have zombies eating something under this human-meat mixer. But it still got a D rating [age 17 and up] from CERO, not a Z. We worked with Nintendo to stretch the limits of that. It definitely lives up to the “Overkill” name. So of course it’s a fun game.

Forget about the Japan game business for a moment — it’s extremely uncommon for someone in the American game industry to openly call out a magazine’s review. EA obliquely criticized OXM’s review of Dead Space in last month’s Game Informer, which looking back I’m very surprised GI’s editors allowed them to do without asking OXM for a response. In Japan such criticism is practically unheard of.

I can’t criticize Hasegawa for his frustration, but I don’t find Famitsu’s scores for Overkill outrageous out-of-hand, either. I do not really trust the mag’s cross-reviews for big-name titles any longer, but once their number scores go below 7, the reviewers are usually bringing up real and believable issues. It’s the same deal with reviews on Amazon or game forums, I suppose — you can sort of get constructive guidance from a negative review, but positive ones often seem “planted” even if they aren’t.

The bigger problem with Famitsu right now is the very obvious score inflation applied to AAA games in the past couple years. Does anyone think there’s any possible way Final Fantasy XIII won’t be awarded a 40 this winter?