Media Criticism

Criticism hits on at least two "orthogonal" (i.e., not fully correlated) aspects: functionality and significance. A significant book (in the literary sense) may not be functional (entertaining), and so a critic that gives it five stars looks pretentious. Meanwhile, a video game with a three star review could have any number of reasons: it's buggy, the plot sucks, the gameplay loop sucks, the characters are unlikeable, the visuals suck. A review has a fundamental ambiguity before the review reader finishes any accompanying analysis.

Meanwhile, critics are exposed to a much higher volume of media than the people reading their analyses; Yahtzee Croshaw has joked about disproportionately demanding novelty due to playing too many games previously, and we see some emergence of a standard critical point on BookTok, with readers noticing that a lot of romance books have the same plot after consuming a shit-ton of them.

As a result, the critic's opinion may not be particularly valid for your personal use case; maybe the issues they find are why you like (or would like) the thing, or you wouldn't notice because you're not as exposed to the space (e.g., tropes.) The real best critic is yourself with more time.

On the subject of tropes, there is (not unreasonable) criticism of trope writing. However, tropes are also a decent and compressed taxonomy for emergent preference and can survive over time as long as they aren't oversaturated by volume.