A Guide to My Rating System

Pictured: The Perfect Grade Unicorn Gundam - the big, white, glowing reason I started scoring the build experience separately from the completed product.

Just a plain, ordinary, admin-tacular blog post here, rather than a focus on a kit. You might have noticed that I've updated all my build diaries and after-action reports with verdicts along the bottom, detailing what I thought was good and bad about each kit, and grading the build experience and the final completed kit in the process. This post is here just to give some context to what those ratings mean, because by God has the internet done terrible things to the concept of review scores, hasn't it?

The Individual Grades

I went with a letter-based grade after so many vague call-backs to the first post I ever made on this blog, but it would make sense to show where exactly I draw the boundaries with each one. I grade the building experience separately from the completed kit, because I find that's just as integral a part of the experience as the final product is. And...well...just because a kit looks nice doesn't mean it was fun to build, and just because a kit doesn't amount to much in the end doesn't mean you won't have a fun evening putting it together.

This grading system is tweaked from the rapid fire video reviews I did a while back, though admittedly I only really fleshed out the overall grade and not so much the building experience grade. My rating system for the building experience (including any transformations, if I've tried it out) is as follows:

S - If you aren't building this, you're missing out

A - Not perfect, but tons of fun

B - A solid building project with the odd awkward moment

C - Be ready for really annoying moments

D - I nearly gave up on this kit at least once

And here are what the overall ratings that come after that grade mean:

S - An experience unlike any other

A - A pleasing result

B - Some flaws, but not enough for me to worry

C - Either a heavily flawed or mediocre kit

D - Utterly Unmemorable

At the risk of once again tempting fate like I did with the aforementioned video, I'm reserving any ranks below D for when something truly terrible comes along.

Of course there are a few things I have to point out before you jump to conclusions:

A less-than-perfect rating doesn't mean I hate the kit

Yeah, I'm preparing myself for an "8.8 to Twilight Princess" scenario, but as much as I was a victim of that same hype, I'm still in disbelief at how many people seem to think lower ratings mean a severe dislike. And unless the kit has a D rank in either category, that's simply not true.

Not all praises and criticisms are created equal

"Oh, but you said tons of nice things about this kit yet gave it a lower score!"

"Why did you still say you loved this kit even though there were tons of thing you complained about?"

Because the idea that the final rating is a quantifiable amount directly related to the number of praises and criticisms is a myth that has plagued subjective reviewing on the internet since the very concept of entertainment reviewing. The idea that reviewers and such start from a basic score then objectively add or dock points based on praises and criticisms is a complete myth. And trying to quantify a complex personal opinion into a rating is a tricky enough process without having to deal with this fallacious belief.

I only rate the out-of-box experience

Please bear in mind, just about any kit in this day and age can still be solid with a ton of work, and just because I didn't enjoy a kit doesn't mean you won't if you're willing to put time and necessary tweaks into the assembly process. But I prefer rating the experience as is, for the benefit of those less familiar with the hobby than I am, and because...well...this is the experience the manufacturers were happy with and wanted to put out to the public in exchange for your hard-earned Yen or whatever.

My experience is almost always going to be different from yours

I don't just mean in a subjective opinion sense. There's a lot that goes into manufacturing the pieces for a kit that it's difficult to say what's just my experience and what's a genuine flaw with the kit sometimes. Maybe a part is moulded wrongly. Maybe pieces are sometimes missing. Maybe my way of doing things differs from yours enough to have an effect on the fundamental building process.

I reserve the right to be tongue-in-cheek

If a bad kit has me grasping at straws to say something positive or if a really good kit has me straining to think of something to nitpick over, don't be surprised if the genuine criticism has goofy stuff alongside it. I'm here to have fun, you're here to have fun, we're all here to have fun. Don't take my posts as some kind of stuffy, snooty "objective" review series that's allegedly 110% serious all the time. It's untrue, and it would be shit if it was true.

My opinions aren't set in stone

I have a bit of an annoying habit of frantically correcting my older posts, but this especially applies to my overall opinions on things. Doubly so if it's a kit that has a tendency to wear out over time like a super-early Real Grade kit. Spare me the appeals to utterly-meaningless hypocrisy if you ever come across an inconsistency in my opinion that you feel the urge to point out, I'm only human and I'm always in a constant state of growth and development just as much as anyone else is.

No, I'm not being paid for my opinions

I know I used to make denying the involvment of any sponsorships in my articles a running joke whenever I linked to whoever I got kits from, but part of the reason I did that joke was because I've grown weary of the blind assumption of an opinion being influenced by some kind of financial benefit. In a world that's given us the likes of the XB1M13 controversy and the CSGOLotto scandal, it should be common sense at this point that inadequate disclosure of sponsored or affiliate content is not only ethically inadvisable, but under FTC and ASA regulations, it's against the law.

And I run this blog as part of a hobby, not a job. So risking legal action due to wilfully misleading sponsorship disclosure is way more trouble than it's worth to me. You have my word - on the slim offchance that anything I post has been sponsored, I'll say it is. You will know that it is. There won't be any debating that it is.

I think that covers about everything, unless I come back to this post to update it like I always do. But hopefully these ratings give a nice quick way of seeing my overall opinions, and a satisfying bow for me to wrap my posts up in once I'm done with them.

Stay safe and keep clipping, folks!