IGN gave Pokemon Omega Ruby a 7.8. The deduction was for 'too much water.'

Let's do the math. Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire: 7.8 out of 10. The cited weakness, listed in the official cons box that IGN at the time required reviewers to fill out: 'Too Much Water.' Three words. No elaboration. No follow-up. Just water, flagged as a structural defect, like a building inspector writing 'too much ceiling' on a condemnation notice.

The math ain't mathing. If water deducts 0.2 from a 10, what does fire deduct? What is the coefficient of grass? Where is the spreadsheet that converts 'aquatic surface area' into review score? Because I have run the regression and there is no model on Earth that produces 7.8 from a Pokemon game and then explains the residual as 'damp.' The R-squared is zero. The p-value is laughing at us.

Let's also address the geography. Hoenn is canonically modeled after Kyushu, an island region. Water is not a bug in Hoenn. Water is the load-bearing feature of Hoenn. Complaining about water in a Pokemon Ruby remake is like reviewing Microsoft Flight Simulator and writing 'too much sky' in the cons. It is reviewing the premise. It is the equivalent of going to a sushi restaurant and rating it 7.8 because the fish was 'too raw.'

The statistics get worse. IGN's average score for mainline Pokemon titles sits at 8.4. The standard deviation is 0.6. A 7.8 is exactly one standard deviation below the mean, which mathematically means the deduction has to come from somewhere. And the 'somewhere' that Jose Otero documented, in writing, on the internet, forever, was: a body of liquid that covers 71 percent of the planet he lives on. The numbers don't lie. The reviewer might.