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>Junichi Masuda has adopted many contradictory positions since taking office, but he has been unwavering on one point: that paid reviewers played no role in Pokemon Let’s Go review score. Masuda dismisses the idea that reviewer interference affected the outcome of the 2018 metascore, calling it a “made-up story,” “ridiculous,” and “a hoax.” He finds the subject so threatening to his legitimacy that—according to “Pokestalgia: nostalgia and the Pokemon success,” a recent book on franchise by Shinichiro Uwei, of the Japanes Times—aides say he refuses even to discuss it. In public, Masuda has characterized all efforts to investigate the foreign attacks on Pokemon performance during the pre-release as a “witch hunt”; in july, he insisted “that paid reviewers had no impact on our scores whatsoever.”
>The case for low user scores is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by veteran pokemon trolls and hackers—whom he terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence reviewers, and under what circumstances. Video game reviews around the world, he told me, have begun to realize that subverting a review score doesn’t require tampering with review mechanisms. Extensive studies of past releases, Masuda said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” He continued, “I’m not arguing that poketrolls pulled the reviewer levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either review a certain way or not review at all.”
