I almost brought it up in this post, but IGN did something neat for their never-completed Dreamcast retrospective. For each game they covered, they listed the secondary-market value as well as what they thought the game should be worth. That’s a nice, subtle way of working around the monetary issue, but it would be impossible to get away with when it comes to new releases.

All (good) reviews are complete opinion anyway, and you try to find reviewers that match your tastes generally, however when it comes to perceived value of a game or how difficulty these are going to change drastically from person to person to the point where its almost not worth mentioning.

Yep; thus my point.

As for variances between reviewers: to RPGamer’s credit, they’ll often have multiple reviews for a single game, especially for the popular ones that have been out for awhile. Completion times and difficulty can vary wildly between reviews of certain games, but in general, they’re fairly consistent.

And how many big named reviewers do you think really complete long JRPG’s?

Before review? None of them, which is why I largely stick to fansite reviews and personal recommendations for that genre. Still, many of them are formulaic enough where it wouldn’t hurt to make an educated guesstimate (again, see RPGamer’s reviews).

I do agree though, more information like this would be useful when trying to choose which games to play, but in the end its all less important than the actual content of the game itself.

Well, yeah, that’s sort of why I wouldn’t mind to see this kind of content sifted out more often.

The problem with all these though, is that they are so opinionated. All (good) reviews are complete opinion anyway, and you try to find reviewers that match your tastes generally, however when it comes to perceived value of a game or how difficulty these are going to change drastically from person to person to the point where its almost not worth mentioning. Again with average length of the game, its possible to do this with many titles, but with others its not so easy. Working out what that average really is probably isn’t worth most reviewers time. And how many big named reviewers do you think really complete long JRPG’s?

I do agree though, more information like this would be useful when trying to choose which games to play, but in the end its all less important than the actual content of the game itself.