About The Anime Reviewer
The Anime Reviewer (TAR) is a platform dedicated to collecting and organizing critical analysis of anime in one place. Our goal is to provide both a comprehensive database of reviews and a way to understand the critical consensus surrounding each work.
Each anime that receives a sufficient number of reviews is assigned a numerical score from 0 to 10. These scores are used throughout the site to rank anime across the database, as well as within specific types, genres, seasons, and studios.
However, reviewers do not assign these numerical scores themselves. Instead, every review uses the TAR Recommendation System, and the numerical scores displayed on the site are calculated from those recommendations.
The TAR Recommendation System
The TAR Recommendation System consists of five possible recommendations:
Must Watch: The reviewer strongly recommends the work.
Watch: The reviewer recommends the work, but with some reservations.
Neutral: The reviewer has no clear recommendation for or against the work.
Pass: The reviewer recommends skipping the work, but with some reservations.
Hard Pass: The reviewer strongly recommends not watching the work.
These recommendations are the foundation of TAR's scoring and ranking system.
Rather than asking reviewers to assign an arbitrary number to their opinion, TAR asks them to answer a much simpler and more meaningful question:
Would you recommend this anime to someone else?
The resulting recommendations are then converted into numerical values for use in rankings and other parts of the site. This allows TAR to provide the convenience of numerical rankings without requiring reviewers to pretend that their judgment can be expressed with artificial numerical precision.
What Our Reviews Evaluate
Reviews on The Anime Reviewer are expected to follow a set of criteria designed to make recommendations as consistent and meaningful as possible.
How Much of an Anime Must Be Watched?
Reviews do not require a fixed amount of viewing.
Anime are serialized works, and there is no universal point at which a reviewer has experienced "enough" of a series to form a valid opinion. A reviewer may reach a verdict when:
- They have enough information to assess the work's direction and quality; or
- Their experience and analytical framework allow them to confidently predict the work's overall direction and quality.
This means that a review does not necessarily need to cover an entire series. What matters is whether the reviewer has sufficient grounds for their recommendation.
The Original Japanese Broadcast
Reviews must evaluate the anime based on the original Japanese version as it was broadcast.
Dubbed versions are absolutely not to be used or referenced. Subsequent Japanese media releases that polish, uncensor or slightly change the original broadcast can be taken into account.
The Work Itself
Recommendations are based primarily on the qualities of the anime being reviewed.
Reception by the public, popularity, reputation, or the opinions of other reviewers should not determine the recommendation. Likewise, the quality or reputation of related works should not be used as a substitute for evaluating the work itself.
Context
Genre, intended audience, format, and other relevant characteristics are taken into account when evaluating a work.
A reviewer should judge an anime according to what it is attempting to accomplish and the context in which it exists, rather than applying identical expectations to fundamentally different types of works.
Recommendations Must Be Sincere
Recommendations should represent the reviewer's genuine opinion.
TAR does not use "so bad it's good" or deliberately ironic recommendations. A reviewer may certainly discuss these qualities in their analysis, but the final recommendation should reflect whether they genuinely recommend the work to their audience.
Reviewer Selection and Community Oversight
TAR reviewers are vetted before being accepted onto the platform. Applicants are evaluated using a selection of their previous reviews in order to determine whether they demonstrate the ability to produce meaningful and consistent critical analysis.
However, being accepted as a reviewer does not mean that every subsequent review is individually approved by an editor. Once a reviewer has been vetted, their subsequent reviews are generally published without an editor re-evaluating every recommendation. This is an intentional part of how TAR operates.
Users are the final line of defense.
If you encounter a review that violates TAR's standards, appears to have been evaluated improperly, or otherwise raises concerns, we encourage you to report it. User feedback provides an important safeguard against mistakes and helps us identify problems that may not be caught during the initial reviewer-vetting process. If you find a review that does not follow these standards, please contact us at dev@theanimereviewer.com.
Why not use a numbered score?
Although the computed score for each work is numerical, reviewers themselves do not assign numerical scores. This is one of the fundamental differences between TAR and the conventional scoring systems used by most anime databases and review platforms.
We believe asking reviewers to choose between five meaningful recommendations produces more consistent and useful judgments than asking them to assign a number, particularly when a scale contains more than five possible values.
Numbers make it harder to choose an outcome. When rating multiple works from 0 to 10, a reviewer needs a consistent understanding of what every number represents and how each number compares with the others. Maintaining that distinction across a large number of reviews is difficult.
Numerical scores require a frame of reference. The meaning of a score depends heavily on the other works against which it is being compared. As a reviewer watches and evaluates more works, their understanding of the scale may change, potentially making earlier scores inconsistent with later ones.
Numbers create an illusion of objectivity. Critical analysis is inherently subjective. A precise numerical score, particularly one expressed with decimal points, can imply a level of objective measurement that the underlying judgment cannot realistically support. Critical analysis produces an opinion, not a number; the number is something that can be derived from that opinion afterward.
Numbers do not have an intrinsic meaning. An 8 for one reviewer may represent something very different from an 8 for another. Establishing a universal understanding of what every number on a 0–10 scale should mean is extremely difficult.
People rarely use the entire scale. Despite having ten possible values, reviewers often concentrate their scores within a much smaller range. For example, a reviewer using a 1–10 scale may effectively use only 7, 8, 9, and 10. This reduces the practical value of having such a large number of possible scores.
Numerical scores are still useful for organizing a large database. They allow users to compare works, sort rankings, and understand the overall consensus among reviewers. For this reason, TAR converts recommendations into numerical values for display and ranking purposes. Numbers are good for users, but not for reviewers.
Many of our reviewers also publish their work on platforms that require numerical scores. In some cases, we therefore have to translate those scores into the TAR Recommendation System. Because those scores were originally assigned using a different methodology, the resulting recommendation may not perfectly represent the reviewer's intended judgment. Reviewers are free to change their recommendation of reported reviews from outside sources using the Reviewer Area. If you are a reviewer and do not have access to this feature. Please email dev@theanimereviewer.com