Jumping between playing VII and XIII is just surreal. Whenever anyone would complain about the cringeworthy dialog in the series lately I would shrug it off. Somewhere in my mind I was under the impression that it was always there, but no, the writing really did take one hell of hit right around the time things started getting voiced, didn't it? The overall stories have been perfectly fine, but its like they forgot how to hold a conversation.
like daris said, I feel like the main reason for the apparent difference in quality between older jrpgs and newer ones is the fact that those lines are spoken at all. I felt like I could tolerate cheesy or sort-of cliche dialogue in older games more easily simply because my brain could just fill in the blanks and find a way to process the dialogue so it just didn't seem so lame. Or I'd read through it quickly enough that I didn't have time to dwell as much on the quality of the writing. With voice acting and advanced graphics, though, the new games really submerge you in every odd turn of phrase and every instance of weird body language, so it's harder to ignore the words.
It also didn't help that FF 10 and 12 seemed to take themselves super seriously at every moment, so I consequently found their writing flaws more glaring than they might have been otherwise. I haven't actually played FF13 so the quality of the writing may very well be significantly worse.
Jumping between playing VII and XIII is just surreal. Whenever anyone would complain about the cringeworthy dialog in the series lately I would shrug it off. Somewhere in my mind I was under the impression that it was always there, but no, the writing really did take one hell of hit right around the time things started getting voiced, didn't it? The overall stories have been perfectly fine, but its like they forgot how to hold a conversation.
like daris said, I feel like the main reason for the apparent difference in quality between older jrpgs and newer ones is the fact that those lines are spoken at all. I felt like I could tolerate cheesy or sort-of cliche dialogue in older games more easily simply because my brain could just fill in the blanks and find a way to process the dialogue so it just didn't seem so lame. Or I'd read through it quickly enough that I didn't have time to dwell as much on the quality of the writing. With voice acting and advanced graphics, though, the new games really submerge you in every odd turn of phrase and every instance of weird body language, so it's harder to ignore the words.
It also didn't help that FF 10 and 12 seemed to take themselves super seriously at every moment, so I consequently found their writing flaws more glaring than they might have been otherwise. I haven't actually played FF13 so the quality of the writing may very well be significantly worse.
Speaking of voice acting, I have a slightly different issue with some Final Fantasy voice acting - as a British person I simply cannot stand the use of American voice actors in the games that have traditional fantasy settings. I had real problems with Final Fantasy IV DS, and in Dissidia the Warrior of Light's totally inappropriate American everyman voice got on my nerves. I'd be a lot more tolerant if the games were made in America in the first place, but just nothing about the design or settings of the more Tolkienesque ones say 'America' to me. And given that Square Enix do localise many of their games over here anyway, I wish they'd do the more traditional Final Fantasy ones as well.
Speaking of voice acting, I have a slightly different issue with some Final Fantasy voice acting - as a British person I simply cannot stand the use of American voice actors in the games that have traditional fantasy settings. I had real problems with Final Fantasy IV DS, and in Dissidia the Warrior of Light's totally inappropriate American everyman voice got on my nerves. I'd be a lot more tolerant if the games were made in America in the first place, but just nothing about the design or settings of the more Tolkienesque ones say 'America' to me. And given that Square Enix do localise many of their games over here anyway, I wish they'd do the more traditional Final Fantasy ones as well.
Because people in fictional medieval settings all speak with a British accent. :P
U.S. release of FF IV Complete includes just a couple of Amano artwork cards and the new Dissidia DLC outfits for Cecil. Bluh. I'd like to have seen some kind of special edition with a proper artbook/retrospective of FF IV's development and refinement over the years, but whatever. It's still better than Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep's stickers.
Speaking of voice acting, I have a slightly different issue with some Final Fantasy voice acting - as a British person I simply cannot stand the use of American voice actors in the games that have traditional fantasy settings. I had real problems with Final Fantasy IV DS, and in Dissidia the Warrior of Light's totally inappropriate American everyman voice got on my nerves. I'd be a lot more tolerant if the games were made in America in the first place, but just nothing about the design or settings of the more Tolkienesque ones say 'America' to me. And given that Square Enix do localise many of their games over here anyway, I wish they'd do the more traditional Final Fantasy ones as well.
Huh. That never once occurred to me. I guess I don't see any of the Final Fantasy settings as being Tolkienesque. Even if they do have knights in armor, dwarves, etc.
Oh I dunno, I could also suggest that the villains could have British accents along the lines of General Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. I'd imagine Golbez would do nicely with that kind of voice.
Kefka on the other hand would be awesome with a scottish accent. Think thusly:
Speaking of voice acting, I have a slightly different issue with some Final Fantasy voice acting - as a British person I simply cannot stand the use of American voice actors in the games that have traditional fantasy settings. I had real problems with Final Fantasy IV DS, and in Dissidia the Warrior of Light's totally inappropriate American everyman voice got on my nerves. I'd be a lot more tolerant if the games were made in America in the first place, but just nothing about the design or settings of the more Tolkienesque ones say 'America' to me. And given that Square Enix do localise many of their games over here anyway, I wish they'd do the more traditional Final Fantasy ones as well.
Huh. That never once occurred to me. I guess I don't see any of the Final Fantasy settings as being Tolkienesque. Even if they do have knights in armor, dwarves, etc.
Same. FF is not Tolkien-esque in the least. Even from the first game, there's always been some science-fiction/futuristic elements along with the traditional fantasy stuff, and of course it's always far more magic-heavy than anything in Tolkien's work.
I qualified 'Tolkienesque' with the word 'more' because they aren't that Tolkienesque - it was just a handy shorthand that prevented the sentence from becoming awkward.
The thing is you can't come back at me and say 'ooh, look at you, you're saying all characters in vaguely traditional fantasy settings should have British accents, like some kind of accent Nazi'. I'm not really. It's just these games are Japanese - they're supposed to get localised so that people in particular locations can understand them and relate to them better. But when games come along that have these links, however tenuous, with British folklore and British works of literature, and they turn up over here and the characters speak with American accents, and sometimes American spelling and grammar is used in the text, I don't feel that I relate to them as well as I would if they had been localised properly for the region in which I live. Sometimes it doesn't really matter (for example in Final Fantasy XIII I didn't really think about the localisation that much), and sometimes it's actually better for the American localisation to be reused (for example with Persona 4 the setting is probably closer to American high-school culture than anything over here, and through TV and films we're pretty familiar with that). But sometimes it can pretty jarring and you spend a whole game wishing they'd given you the option of having the original Japanese audio.
The thing is, for a lot of text-based games (for example the GBA FF games), the scripts are re-adapted or occasionally completely re-translated over here. And this was why I brought it up really - some people were complaining that RPG dialogue doesn't work as well now it's spoken out loud, compared to when it was written down - but for a lot of other people there's an extra issue: the extra cost of localisation means they become kind of like a secondary audience. I've spent this post moaning but to certain extent I'm doing OK - at least when I play a voiced RPG, the characters are speaking in my native language. In mainland Europe they have to put up characters jabbering in a foreign language which they may not even fully understand.
Also, what the fucking fuck!?
I thought it was mission 51 that replaced all the turtles with stronger turtles? Cause I haven't done it (I've done everything but) and now I can't kill anything. I haven't done any turtle farming so now I'm fucked.
Doing a different localization for each region of English would be great, but that's an extra expense that most companies don't want to pay. And when the North American video game industry and market is so much bigger than the UK or Australian ones, it's pretty easy to see which region gets picked for the one English localization.
Jumping between playing VII and XIII is just surreal. Whenever anyone would complain about the cringeworthy dialog in the series lately I would shrug it off. Somewhere in my mind I was under the impression that it was always there, but no, the writing really did take one hell of hit right around the time things started getting voiced, didn't it? The overall stories have been perfectly fine, but its like they forgot how to hold a conversation.
like daris said, I feel like the main reason for the apparent difference in quality between older jrpgs and newer ones is the fact that those lines are spoken at all. I felt like I could tolerate cheesy or sort-of cliche dialogue in older games more easily simply because my brain could just fill in the blanks and find a way to process the dialogue so it just didn't seem so lame. Or I'd read through it quickly enough that I didn't have time to dwell as much on the quality of the writing. With voice acting and advanced graphics, though, the new games really submerge you in every odd turn of phrase and every instance of weird body language, so it's harder to ignore the words.
It also didn't help that FF 10 and 12 seemed to take themselves super seriously at every moment, so I consequently found their writing flaws more glaring than they might have been otherwise. I haven't actually played FF13 so the quality of the writing may very well be significantly worse.
So much truth in this post.
It's not that it's voiced.
It's that it's dubbed.
You're getting a constant "Lost in Translation" theme.
Not to mention that the localization team takes liberties with the translation.
"Arigató" comes out as "I love you" in X for example.
Play Final Fantasy X "undubbed". English subtitles, Japanese voices (if you can't understand the Japanese). It's a vastly superior game.
This is generally the same problem Anime shows have.
For Final Fantasy XII however, I don't know where they were hiring that British thespian crew that did the voice overs, but that actually generally worked about 80% of the time. It was a one-off though.
FFXIII is also proof that good voicework can not make up for a lackluster story.
No kidding.
I think XIII's dub is almost all very good, but I can't stand the game.
Meanwhile, I think X is a great game with a great story, but it has a lot of rough spots in the dub. That's to be expected, given when the game was made. Wasn't it the first fully-voiced JRPG? Still, I can't make excuses for the laughing scene or Yuna's mousy voice.
Dubbing in general is not the problem. The quality of the dub is what matters. Good dubs happen all the time now both in anime and videogames.
FFXII's dub was not a one-off, either. Crisis Core, Dissidia, Nier, and FFXIII had fantastic dubs.
No, it's dubbing in general. You lose every time you dub.
Yes, there are better and worser dubs (90% in the latter group), but you lose out 100% of the time when it's from a language that isn't from a Proto-Indo European group (and is being dubbed into that one). You lose out regardless of course, even when it's within that group, but quite a lot more so when it's from without.
How much you lose... it varies. Much of it has to do with the message.
And since most messages from videogames are fucking ridiculous (which all Final Fantasies are, story wise, it's all retarded fantasy bullshit when you get right down to the merits), the dichotomy is that much greater.
Also, the games you listed have atrocious omissions, not to mention miscast voice actors (if you could voice cast them into the culture anyway).
Vanille's default personality is a good example. Western cultures don't have that expressed personality as part of a recognized culture. Whoever acts like that (and isn't 5 years old) is a section 8 automatically. That's why they did her Australian, to make it "foreign" from Received Pronunciation or General American, and therefore shoehorn it in to sound "acceptable". It works too, to a degree.
But the veil is useless on those that see right through it. And you can't reconcile the rift. The square peg doesn't fit into the round hole no matter how much you try to saw the edges off.
So you lose no matter how you flip it. Sometimes more, sometimes less. The second best thing is to just to play/watch it in the original, and read the texted subtitles.
The best thing is to speak the language of origin though, obviously.
FFXIII is also proof that good voicework can not make up for a lackluster story.
No kidding.
I think XIII's dub is almost all very good, but I can't stand the game.
Meanwhile, I think X is a great game with a great story, but it has a lot of rough spots in the dub. That's to be expected, given when the game was made. Wasn't it the first fully-voiced JRPG? Still, I can't make excuses for the laughing scene or Yuna's mousy voice.
I think there was at least one other voiced RPG before it, but I'm pretty sure that was SE's first.
EDIT: It was Square-Enix by the time X came out, right? Maybe I'll start it up and check...and play through it once again.
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Blackdove, it's obvious we disagree on a fundamental level. But I'm curious, what are these omissions you mentioned? And what exactly do you "lose" when you dub?
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chiasaur11Never doubt a raccoon.Do you think it's trademarked?Registered Userregular
edited March 2011
Going to agree with the Dubs can be perfectly fine club here.
Been watching Nier, and honestly, I can't see much lost in translation. Changed, maybe, but different countries, different ways to get the same concepts across.
Dac VinS-s-screw you! I only listen to DOUBLE MUSIC!Registered Userregular
edited March 2011
The dubs/localisation not 100% accurately conveying the original work has next to nearly nothing to do with its inherent quality. Of course something will be lost in translation, but with enough knowhow of your own language you can make said translation loss completely negligible.
(Also the term "nakama" can die in a fire but this isn't the One Piece thread so I'll just leave it at that.)
I'm not too worried about translations being perfect as long as they're still enjoyable in their own right. But even saying that, I'm not convinced Square Enix's dubs deserve the high praise they're having lavished on them. I thought Final Fantasy XIII's dub was merely OK. Terra and Aqua in Birth By Sleep were pretty duff. Dissidia's localisation just seemed generally poor to me, although I suppose there's a chance the source material could be partly to blame there.
I think if there was one thing I could change about dubbing (other than the accents, obviously!) it would be to use voice actors closer to the actual age of the characters. I don't think Lightning's voice in XIII fit her that well, partly because the voice actress was obviously older than the character. Balthier's voice actor in XII is older than the character, although I can just about forgive that as he's pretty good and Balthier's age only really comes across in the FMV.
Replaying through FFX right now, the part about the dubbing that really stands out is the lack of background noise, the lack of interruptions in conversation, and the stereotypical awful voices they assigned to people. Why is Wakka the only person on Besaid with that awful accent? I mean, I love John DiMaggio, but that makes no sense! These are things that are at fault with the game design and not the quality of voice work itself.
Oh yeah, and I had 0 problem with the laughing scene. It actually made tons of sense. They were trying to be goofy in the face of being sad, coping with the events surrounding them. It's like a kid impersonating an adults voice, it sounds hoaky, but in the context of the scene it works.
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I just find that in a lot of JRPGS (but it isn't a problem exclusive to them) the dialogue feels like it has been written with textboxes in mind, so conversations between characters sound odd and stilted when said aloud. It just ends up as two people saying things at each other rather than having a conversation.
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A surprisingly manly response from Cloud. Now I know why Tifa puts up with him. So dreamy
The funny part is that this line could easily be said by either character. I hope Prishe is actually the one saying it.
:winky:
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like daris said, I feel like the main reason for the apparent difference in quality between older jrpgs and newer ones is the fact that those lines are spoken at all. I felt like I could tolerate cheesy or sort-of cliche dialogue in older games more easily simply because my brain could just fill in the blanks and find a way to process the dialogue so it just didn't seem so lame. Or I'd read through it quickly enough that I didn't have time to dwell as much on the quality of the writing. With voice acting and advanced graphics, though, the new games really submerge you in every odd turn of phrase and every instance of weird body language, so it's harder to ignore the words.
It also didn't help that FF 10 and 12 seemed to take themselves super seriously at every moment, so I consequently found their writing flaws more glaring than they might have been otherwise. I haven't actually played FF13 so the quality of the writing may very well be significantly worse.
So much truth in this post.
He'll chicken out at the last moment, using the excuse that he discovered a pirate map leading to a new pirate adventure as he makes a hasty retreat.
Tidus, though? He can totally handle that. :^:
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Vaan is the one being captioned in that pic.
Because people in fictional medieval settings all speak with a British accent. :P
ftfy
Huh. That never once occurred to me. I guess I don't see any of the Final Fantasy settings as being Tolkienesque. Even if they do have knights in armor, dwarves, etc.
Kefka on the other hand would be awesome with a scottish accent. Think thusly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvSQSAkZoZc
Same. FF is not Tolkien-esque in the least. Even from the first game, there's always been some science-fiction/futuristic elements along with the traditional fantasy stuff, and of course it's always far more magic-heavy than anything in Tolkien's work.
The thing is you can't come back at me and say 'ooh, look at you, you're saying all characters in vaguely traditional fantasy settings should have British accents, like some kind of accent Nazi'. I'm not really. It's just these games are Japanese - they're supposed to get localised so that people in particular locations can understand them and relate to them better. But when games come along that have these links, however tenuous, with British folklore and British works of literature, and they turn up over here and the characters speak with American accents, and sometimes American spelling and grammar is used in the text, I don't feel that I relate to them as well as I would if they had been localised properly for the region in which I live. Sometimes it doesn't really matter (for example in Final Fantasy XIII I didn't really think about the localisation that much), and sometimes it's actually better for the American localisation to be reused (for example with Persona 4 the setting is probably closer to American high-school culture than anything over here, and through TV and films we're pretty familiar with that). But sometimes it can pretty jarring and you spend a whole game wishing they'd given you the option of having the original Japanese audio.
The thing is, for a lot of text-based games (for example the GBA FF games), the scripts are re-adapted or occasionally completely re-translated over here. And this was why I brought it up really - some people were complaining that RPG dialogue doesn't work as well now it's spoken out loud, compared to when it was written down - but for a lot of other people there's an extra issue: the extra cost of localisation means they become kind of like a secondary audience. I've spent this post moaning but to certain extent I'm doing OK - at least when I play a voiced RPG, the characters are speaking in my native language. In mainland Europe they have to put up characters jabbering in a foreign language which they may not even fully understand.
I thought it was mission 51 that replaced all the turtles with stronger turtles? Cause I haven't done it (I've done everything but) and now I can't kill anything. I haven't done any turtle farming so now I'm fucked.
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It's not that it's voiced.
It's that it's dubbed.
You're getting a constant "Lost in Translation" theme.
Not to mention that the localization team takes liberties with the translation.
"Arigató" comes out as "I love you" in X for example.
Play Final Fantasy X "undubbed". English subtitles, Japanese voices (if you can't understand the Japanese). It's a vastly superior game.
This is generally the same problem Anime shows have.
For Final Fantasy XII however, I don't know where they were hiring that British thespian crew that did the voice overs, but that actually generally worked about 80% of the time. It was a one-off though.
FFXII's dub was not a one-off, either. Crisis Core, Dissidia, Nier, and FFXIII had fantastic dubs.
No kidding.
I think XIII's dub is almost all very good, but I can't stand the game.
Meanwhile, I think X is a great game with a great story, but it has a lot of rough spots in the dub. That's to be expected, given when the game was made. Wasn't it the first fully-voiced JRPG? Still, I can't make excuses for the laughing scene or Yuna's mousy voice.
No, it's dubbing in general. You lose every time you dub.
Yes, there are better and worser dubs (90% in the latter group), but you lose out 100% of the time when it's from a language that isn't from a Proto-Indo European group (and is being dubbed into that one). You lose out regardless of course, even when it's within that group, but quite a lot more so when it's from without.
How much you lose... it varies. Much of it has to do with the message.
And since most messages from videogames are fucking ridiculous (which all Final Fantasies are, story wise, it's all retarded fantasy bullshit when you get right down to the merits), the dichotomy is that much greater.
Also, the games you listed have atrocious omissions, not to mention miscast voice actors (if you could voice cast them into the culture anyway).
Vanille's default personality is a good example. Western cultures don't have that expressed personality as part of a recognized culture. Whoever acts like that (and isn't 5 years old) is a section 8 automatically. That's why they did her Australian, to make it "foreign" from Received Pronunciation or General American, and therefore shoehorn it in to sound "acceptable". It works too, to a degree.
But the veil is useless on those that see right through it. And you can't reconcile the rift. The square peg doesn't fit into the round hole no matter how much you try to saw the edges off.
So you lose no matter how you flip it. Sometimes more, sometimes less. The second best thing is to just to play/watch it in the original, and read the texted subtitles.
The best thing is to speak the language of origin though, obviously.
Dubs ruin the message of a story. Lord knows I got pissed when the One Piece dub didn't use the term nakama properly.
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That accent is better than the country accent that Cait Sith 2 talked with in the game.
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I think there was at least one other voiced RPG before it, but I'm pretty sure that was SE's first.
EDIT: It was Square-Enix by the time X came out, right? Maybe I'll start it up and check...and play through it once again.
Been watching Nier, and honestly, I can't see much lost in translation. Changed, maybe, but different countries, different ways to get the same concepts across.
Why I fear the ocean.
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(Also the term "nakama" can die in a fire but this isn't the One Piece thread so I'll just leave it at that.)
I think if there was one thing I could change about dubbing (other than the accents, obviously!) it would be to use voice actors closer to the actual age of the characters. I don't think Lightning's voice in XIII fit her that well, partly because the voice actress was obviously older than the character. Balthier's voice actor in XII is older than the character, although I can just about forgive that as he's pretty good and Balthier's age only really comes across in the FMV.
Oh yeah, and I had 0 problem with the laughing scene. It actually made tons of sense. They were trying to be goofy in the face of being sad, coping with the events surrounding them. It's like a kid impersonating an adults voice, it sounds hoaky, but in the context of the scene it works.
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