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MQ and SoE were better than SD3 and BL in at least one way and that was the music.

Mystic Quest and Secret of Evermore also have better music than Final Fantasy 5.

Okay, maybe I'm ruffling a few feathers with that. But...

#1. When people use the term "taste", it makes me think of how when you eat chocolate, everyone, even little kids, immediately know it's delicious. Or when you eat something rotten, you immediately spit it out. But movies and videogames are not something you purely react to in instinctive terms. There is an intellectual response.

#2. Similarly, taste is not something we get when we are born, and that's it. Taste can be developed. This is even true for the real sense of taste (people speak of a "refined palate").

#3. Though taste might not be "objective", that's not a show stopper. Somehow, for artforms that have existed for hundreds of years, and have been debated and contemplated by smart people for hundreds of years, a very good culture has been built up.

#4. And, yes, despite all that, people always disagree on individual things. I don't even know if the concept of "having the same taste" means anything, in that I doubt any two people have the same opinions on most things. I consider it uncommon for two people to agree 65% of the time on things in general (say, any movie or videogame chosen at random from a pool of thousands), and 80% of the time with things that are more important (a movie that one of them would have an extreme opinion on -- a 4/5 or 1/0 star movie)

#5. But despite THAT, it is actually possible to UNDERSTAND why smart people have different opinions than you do. Again, taste and subjectivity are not mystical, magical things. People have reasons for their opinions, and smart people can back up those opinions. If people did not have reasons for having their opinions, but it just came down to them liking things because their taste was compatible with whatever they liked, there'd be no point in writing reviews that tried to explain what the reviewer thought. Reviews might as well just say, "I liked this game because I liked it."

People can even change their minds over time, and like things they didn't used to, or vice versa. Sometimes that's because they see qualities in it that they missed at first but that were pointed out by others.

To add one more comment about the review thing, I don't think the point of reviews should be simply to give recommendations or to act as a buying guide. It is much more interesting if a review inspires thought or discussion on the game in question.