Colloquially, an IGN review has become more than just a critique—it’s a meme, a lightning rod for online discourse, and a battleground. This is especially true in the anime space, where numerical scores are treated less as subjective assessments and more like declarations of war, with fandoms accusing them of rage engagement clicks.
For the critics who decide these scores, the backlash often spills into their mentions and DMs on social media platforms. In 2025, reviewing anime isn’t just about evaluating a show’s artistic merit; it’s about weighing whether a writer can survive the fallout of a fandom’s fury should a show’s premiere and season finale not vibe with them. I spoke with stalwart IGN freelance reviewers Rafael Motamayor, Siddhant Adlakha, and Kirsten Carey to debunk misconceptions about reviews of popular anime and animated works for one of gaming’s biggest publications.
What makes a 10/10 anime?
IGN is quite transparent about the criteria that determine its numerical scores. The site has examples of its review scale and what qualifies a video game, TV show, or movie as unbearable, painful, awful, bad, mediocre, okay, good, great, amazing, or a masterpiece. Since the scores range from one to 10, people online often compare them to school grades out of 100, where a seven—commonly joked about as a typical pub score—is seen as a C-grade, failing to realize it still indicates a good rating.
Other readers have taken it upon themselves to use the rubric to compare IGN’s scores to each other, aiming to determine whether one work is better than another. The most popular meme involves people comparing new reviews to IGN’s score for Imagine Party Babyz.
It’s also difficult to give something a 10 that isn’t over.
Contrary to the idea that IGN randomly selects writers to review superhero shows and anime, writers must pitch to IGN’s editor, explaining their expertise and familiarity with the medium or source material, to let editors know their critique comes from an informed place.
I asked Motamayor, Adlakha, and Carey what they look for in the rarely awarded masterpiece, or 10, IGN review score.
“Whether or not it accomplishes what the show is trying to do from the beginning,” Motamayor said. “Different shows are trying to do different things. Not every show is trying to be serious, dramatic, [or] epic. But whether or not the goal of the show is accomplished and whether or not it does something unique for the tone, genre, or the space in which the show occupies.”
“For me, it’s a combination of how ambitious something is versus how well it executes that ambition,” Adlakha said. “If a particular episode has a high bar for what it’s going for—whether it’s visually, emotionally, or thematically—and if it’s able to stir up emotions in a successful way using the tools of the medium, that for me makes it a successful episode.”
“A 10 out of 10 anime would be gorgeously animated, and this is my own bias, preferably 2D animation, and if it’s CG, Spider-Verse levels with immaculate artistic choices with a good story, characters,” Carey said. “No weird sexism or anti-LGBTQ stuff happening that makes little flags go up in my brain. The difference between a nine and a 10, for lack of a better word, is an X factor. When people look back on that review 10 years from now, if the internet is still around, that will age well.”
Save for the final season of Attack on Titan, which Motamayor reviewed, contemporary anime has yet to get a masterpiece, or 10, rating.
“It’s also difficult to give something a 10 that isn’t over,” Carey said. “Most anime coming out right now, you’re just reviewing the first couple of episodes. How can you give the beginning of something a 10 unless it's the most incredible opening to a thing you’ve ever seen? I guess I would give the first episode of Attack on Titan a 10 because that’s an iconic hook. But it’s tough to give the beginning of a thing, or an unfinished thing, a perfect score because we don’t know how it’s gonna end.”
IGN is often misperceived as a hegemonic entity when it comes to its numerical review scores, especially in the anime genre, rather than focusing on individual reviewers with varying tastes. While using a numerical score is, for better or worse, a convenient summary and a core part of IGN’s identity as a media outlet, reviewers are divided on their opinions of these scores and whether they capture or oversimplify the nuances of an anime.
“I start by figuring out the number, and then write the review in a way to justify it. That helps me structure things,” Carey said. “The way that I worry about it flattening is if the number review is gonna make it seem like I like [a show] less than I do. Even if something is a six, that’s still ‘Okay.’ I enjoy the structure of how the number comes at the end, so you’re working up to the reveal, even though I know a lot of people who just scroll down to see what the number is. I’ve done that on other people’s reviews.”
“I have mixed feelings on numerical scores because I think on one hand they can be a representative shorthand of what someone feels about something that can be a helpful guide,” Adlakha said. “But I think the way it’s interpreted a lot of the time—whether it’s a score out of 10 or five stars on a film-centric website, I think people see that as the end-all of criticism. [Readers will] look at what the score is and not even read what you’ve written and treat it as an attempt at objectivity, and then they tend to clash with you on that.”
“I do not like numerical scores at all,” Motamayor said. “It definitely boils [a review] down. It makes it a shortcut for people to just read a score and ignore everything else.”
Granted, IGN provides numerous ways for readers to access short versions of reviews, accompanied by verdicts and blurbs that characterize its numerical rating, but even still, Motamayor finds that people “just ignore that and go straight for the score.”
Adlakha pointed out that readers often blame a single reviewer as the scapegoat for poor reviews of shows whenever online discussions become heated. In their frustration, audiences frequently overlook that their “this you” quote retweets of recent IGN reviews come from completely different reviewers. Even when confronted with this, some audiences will counter, believing that IGN has a mandate from on high dictating reviews be contrarian.
I’ve received gore for not liking one episode of a show.
This misperception appears to stem from an idea about how YouTube works, where a positive or negative review depends on whether the creator's check clears, implying that it is akin to a paid advertisement. This assumption ignores the fact that review writers are paid a fixed rate regardless of whether the review is positive or negative.
“The idea that there are [pay difference between a positive or negative review] is straight up conspiratorial, and it's such a prevalent thing when it comes to the mistrust of critics and journalism at large that I don't really know what to do about it,” Adlakha said. “Even addressing it seems to lead to even more pushback, but it's also one of many conspiratorial accusations.”
“People have told me ‘You're just trying to be contrarian,’ but usually when I review something, there is no overarching opinion for me to be contrarian towards. There is no public opinion. There's no critical opinion just yet because usually the stuff is reviewed in advance,” Adlakha continued. “Even if I have these amazing psychic powers to predict what the public opinion on something is going to be, being contrarian in that sense would just lead to me being harassed nonstop, which has happened many, many times over reviews. Being intentionally contrarian has no advantages for me, and I don't know what people think [negative reviews] do.”
Rocking the fandom boat
Writing reviews for highly anticipated anime often sparks controversy when a critique doesn't portray a beloved source material’s adaptation positively for fans. This is especially true in shonen anime and superhero shows. IGN’s tendency to exclusively cover big-name anime in a given season—all typically shonen—also comes with more eyes on its anime coverage as well as more scrutiny from audience expectations of a writer reviewing one of anime’s most popular (and toxic) genres. Although Adlakha reviews superhero and superhero animated shows, he encounters a similar phenomenon with backlash on his reviews for popular shows, similar to what Carey and Motamayor experience with their reviews of popular shonen anime.
“It’s fine to have an opinion that runs counter to what a critic is saying, but in the particular case of superhero stuff, especially superhero animated stuff, it’s people who will track you down on any and every possible social media—including LinkedIn—and will just send you the nastiest stuff unprompted,” Adlakha said. “I’ve received gore for not liking one episode of a show. It tends to get really uncomfortable.”
The writers I talked to have become public enemies in IGN readership circles for writing less favorable reviews, which consistently make them the main characters of anime Twitter discourse for several days after their reviews are published. Adlakha and Motamayor are more infamous within IGN’s pool of freelance critics whenever they appear on IGN’s masthead because of their past review scores for popular series like Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Invincible. For clarity, Motamayor rated Demon Slayer Season 4 and Jujutsu Kaisen Shibuya Incident Arc a four and a six, respectively. Meanwhile, Adlakha rated Invincible Season 3 a seven.
“Specifically, when it comes to shonen anime, my reviews on Demon Slayer—and to be fair—you can see my reviews going down with time as, in my opinion, the show got progressively worse,” said Motamayor.
Just like how a series can fluctuate from season to season, the same can happen with its coverage—especially when different reviewers take the reins. That was the case with Demon Slayer, which Carey initially reviewed at the beginning of the Hashira Arc before Motamayor stepped in.
“I disagree hard with the final review, which goes against anyone thinking that IGN reviewers are a monolith,” Carey said.
“There is a tendency, specifically with IGN, to generalize not only a reviewer's opinion based on a single review but the entire website and the entire staff as a singular mindset or opinion,” Motamayor said. “In my case, when things like my Demon Slayer review become a point of discourse among certain groups, then they start looking at my reviews to prove their point. Other than those specific cases, ideals seem to be generalizing IGN as a single entity.”
“It comes down to people seeing a score and then working backwards from there as to what your opinion might be or what your intentions might be without actually reading what you have to say. There’s not much I can do about that if someone’s unwilling to engage with what I’m saying in good faith,” Adlakha said.
Adlakha compared the phenomenon to a kind of cult within the readership that would message him about qualifying a show with a seven or eight IGN score as a “meme score.”
“I’m not gonna unpack what that means,” Adlakha said. “You live in your own world where a number out of 10 tells you something more than just what someone’s opinion might be. I think it’s gone to this almost fringe point. I can’t even begin to reverse engineer what any of it might mean,” Adlakha said. “It’s like the GIF of Donald Glover in Community walking into that room that’s on fire. It feels like I’ve walked into something that there’s some kind of ongoing conversation within this in-group who, through confirmation bias, convinced themselves that reviews on IGN are specifically designed to piss them off. If they’ve collectively decided that nothing I say is going to penetrate that, then I don’t see a point in engaging with it.”
Much of the discourse backlash that comes Motamayor’s way comes from manga readers rather than anime watchers. “I don’t want to generalize all anime fans, but a lot of the louder commenters, specifically on IGN’s website and social media, very much focus on a show being good because of the source material,” Motamayor said. Although many commenters end up agreeing with what Motamayor might say in a review, especially on points he’s less enthusiastic about, like fights in JJK being too long and convoluted, they eventually return to the consensus that he’s wrong because the anime and manga are popular.
“A lot of the engagement seems to be based on reputation rather than the actual artistic value of a show or a movie,” Motamayor said. “Another big part of it is boiling down the show to the fight scenes. If a reviewer finds issues with things other than the fight scenes, it doesn’t matter because the fight scenes, in some anime fans’ opinions, are the only thing that matters.”
Because of this shonen rule of cool, Motamayor says some groups of viewers can excuse almost anything in a critique, but once the focus shifts to an anime’s action—and the difference between special effects compositing and animation—readers tend to have issues with reviewers. That or they assume a reviewer doesn’t understand the subject because they didn’t read the source material—another odd sticking point for anime, which reviewers either avoid mentioning in their reviews (because they’re not reviewing the source material) or emphasize because they also read the manga and comics.
“Even if I have read it, I don’t normally mention the source material in my reviews unless it’s a big part of something specifically worth mentioning,” Motamayor said. “Otherwise, I’m not reviewing a manga [because] you’re watching a show.”
“For me, it helps because it’s about striking a balance in a review, looking at something as both an adaptation and as its own thing,” Adlakha said. “Of course, some people might be looking for complete fidelity to the story and the structure, but for me that’s not what adaptation is all about, especially in an animated medium where you can use things like movement, rhythm, and music to enhance or subvert things that were already done in the source material.”
When hate comments appear, reviewers say IGN mainly steps in if they’re extremely vitriolic by moderating the comments section on its website. Still, because reviews are blasted onto social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it’s unfortunate but common for reviewers to go no-contact on social media or block people for uncharitable responses.
It’s the actual critique in the conversation that is far more important.
While neither of the three have considered walking away from anime review writing because of online discourse, they have weighed whether it is worth putting up with the backlash that spills outside of IGN’s moderation onto their personal social media.
“I have considered whether there is enough of an upside if the downside is being harassed for weeks and months on end across every single social media place that I am available online—email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, BlueSky, Threads, LinkedIn—all at once, sending not just insults but death threats,” Adlakha said. “I have to consider whether this is worth it from a mental health standpoint. I haven’t gone to the extent of walking away, but the thought has come up.”
“The zeroing in on IGN numerical scores comes from the effect that the internet is having on our brain, that we have shorter attention spans. That one percent of people now click on links at Google because everyone’s just reading the AI overview—that is the focus on the numerical score,” Carey said. “We could take away the numerical score, and that would allow more nuance in the review, perhaps, but IGN’s whole model is thrown into the sea... I feel it’s almost less of an issue with IGN and more of an issue with how social media is training us to think. I would love to write reviews where I don’t have to assign a thing and just talk about something, but increasingly few outlets are allowed to do that.”
Hype-driven online culture be damned; traditional criticism is still essential
In the New Yorker’s “In Defense of the Traditional Review,” writer Richard Brody quoted Pauline Kael’s 1971 article “Notes on Heart and Mind,” in which she writes that “Without a few independent critics, there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers.” Brody’s use of the quote highlighted his argument that traditional reviews serve as an essential buffer between audiences and commercial influence, preserving artistic integrity and encouraging informed engagement.
In the case of anime reviews, the buffer of traditional review writing is as crucial as in any other medium. In a media landscape increasingly molded by algorithmic promotion, influencer culture supplanting press interviews, criticism that engages and challenges should be valued. This level of scrutiny can keep conversation alive and help a medium evolve. Review writing that risks discomfort for fandoms and creatives alike is far more valuable than one that reads like a press release angling for a back-of-the-box quote or an accolade trailer shout-out.
While the hate comments and baggage that come with being an IGN anime reviewer haven't deterred Motamayor, Carey, or Alaksha from continuing to work for the publication, that doesn’t mean IGN as an institution doesn’t have room to grow in legitimizing anime reviews within the mainstream. Motamayor suggested IGN and traditional media coverage as a whole should expand its anime coverage beyond shonen-centric content as a way to make reviews of action-oriented shows less of a polarizing echo chamber and to highlight shows that aren’t solely focused on power levels and aura farming.
“My dream world would be one where IGN is reviewing enough anime consistently, where the big show, and specifically the reviewer writing about the big show, is not seen as representative of their whole career or the entire website's reputation. As it is now, the fact that we are mostly just running about the big shows makes it so that the reviews can be boiled down to ‘what, do you not like shonen anime in general, because of one show you didn’t like?’ Or ‘I guess they like writing negative reviews for the engagement.’”
In addition to expanding what kind of anime the site covers, there’s also the question of review scores overshadowing the nuance of a critique.
“The prominence of scores, these numerical figures, tends to be very overemphasized because art is not something you can approach objectively. It’s not what criticism is about, “Adlakha said. “A score or a star rating can be a gateway to a deeper and more fulfilling criticism. But the intense focus on these things reduces what criticism is capable of and skews what the conversation around a piece of art even is in this very thumbs-up, thumbs-down sense. Art and our response to it is a little more complicated than just a yes or no, or a 7 or 8, because I don’t feel that strongly about the numbers themselves. It’s the actual critique in the conversation that is far more important. To only get messages and responses just about a number is like we’re having two completely different conversations.”
