JRPGs and having to read things.

[Reaper195]

I've recently started playing Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. I'm about fifteen or so hours into it and am loving the balls out of the game so far. I know some didn't, but each to their own. However, there is one thing that is constantly annoying me, and that is the lack of voice acting in the game. The main characters have dedicated voice actors, one of which is Scottish and funny as all hell. But for a majority of the game, they only speak through dialogue boxes. This seems to be a somewhat common thing in JRPGs. I understand why it was so back in the day, when we didn't want Final Fantasy 7 to cover more than fifteen discs. But nowadays, where we easily have the technology (We can rebuild him!) and the ability, why am I being forced to read these dialogue boxes when you already have an actor on hand to read the lines out, and do more than a couple of hours of work? I get rather bothered when I'm reading some dude tell me what seems some rather important stuff and there is no voice nor even any music at times (To set the atmosphere?).

TL;DR: In this day and age, why are there full games on console that don't have full voice work, and why does it seem to mainly be JRPGs?

 

[krazykidd]

Money . You gotta pay someone to read all those lines . In a 60-100 hour game like NNK , that amounts to a lot of cash .

Also , comon man , reading ain't that bad . That kinda proves how spoiled today's gamers are as they don't want to read . I personally thing voice acting in videogames is a massive waste of time and money , that could be better served somewhere else . The cost of AAA games are too high as it is , i personally think VA and (most) cinematics , are pointless . Cutting those out would save so much cash from the start.

 

[1UPZ]

I rarely read books these days so I don't mind...
Also with dialogue text instead of voices, you can imagine their voices accordingly.

Also you know the game will be epic and deep when they have text instead of voices... Writers don't have to hold back on dialogue and plot which they have to do with voice acting (most of the times)

Ni No Kuni was amazing... Makes me really hate Square of the last 5-7 years...
Seeing Bandai make a very " Golden era Square-ish" game with Ni No Kuni, I just shook my head how good this game was.

Made me realise...

RPGs with a little bit childish themes is very reminiscent of SNES/PSX RPGs... Even as an adult now I find these kind of games with childish themes most fun, because its honest and not pretentious or convoluted or like "mature" RPG stories these days.. Developers need to realise there are kids inside us adults that yearn not just for mature story lines but story lines that reminds us of our dreams/interest when we were young.

Anyways, moral is, text dialogues isn't that bad, but could of been more convenient to include voice acting too (not just on cut scenes)

 

[Mordekaien]

Well, I'd rather prefer to read dialog boxes than having to deal with terrible voice acting due to lack of cash.
I actually miss those text windows that tell you the status of the world around you (used for example in Fallout 1&2) - it was a nice touch.

 

[ItouKaiji]

There also aren't that many voice actors willing to do JRPGs, if you have watched any dubbed anime then you will realize they use the same pool of voice actors for JRPGs and there are about 5 voice actors that show up in everything. Which is why I don't watch dubbed anime anymore because I am so sick of the hearing the same handful of voice actors over and over again, especially when they have to take on multiple roles. So I'd much rather read the text than listen to the same voice actors over and over again. I swear there are only like 5 of them and they are in everything.

 

[piinyouri]

Voice ating doesn't make this problem any better though.
*glares at Star Ocean: Till The End of Time*
I mean...heh heh, I love that game , it's really-WILL YOU ALL SHUT THE FUCK UP.
.....
AND LET ME PLAY.
Geez
Goddammit

 

[IllumInaTIma]

Yeah, that's one thing that threw me off a little bit when I played Persona 3: Portable for the first time. But the more I played the more I realized that, considering just HOW MUCH content and dialogs there are in the game, it would be colossal effort to voice everything. So, in Persona games they voice only major events, for all other events they just have little voice samples, like "Hi there!", or "That's bad..."

 

[The Wykydtron]

I really like shitloads of text boxes for some reason. There's a reason why Persona 4, BlazBlue and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney are my favourite games. I spent my entire childhood reading god knows how many books and as long as the story is good having a load of dialogue is a non-issue. Maybe just because I can take my time, make a drink, etc etc with the story stuck there until I get back. Heck, the best part of Persona 4 Arena's story is literally a 30 minute-ish line of text boxes with no gameplay at all until a random Elisabeth fight. Labrys has one heck of an interesting backstory...

Seriously, I could listen to Hazama talk about evil things forever. Actually, everything is voice acted in BB. Acted well I might add. You can tell all the VAs had a shitload of fun with it. All that's missing is a narrator reading out the description bits.

I even play through Katawa Shoujo a decent amount (it's literally a straight line once you get the paths right. Shizune barely even has a "path" to begin with.) because the dialogue is REALLY good. Fuckin' Kenji is the funniest thing i've seen for a while now.

Hanako's route or GTFO. She's so cute!

 

[Colt47]

I really like shitloads of text boxes for some reason. There's a reason why Persona 4, BlazBlue and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney are my favourite games. I spent my entire childhood reading god knows how many books and as long as the story is good having a load of dialogue is a non-issue. Maybe just because I can take my time, make a drink, etc etc with the story stuck there until I get back. Heck, the best part of Persona 4 Arena's story is literally a 30 minute-ish line of text boxes with no gameplay at all until a random Elisabeth fight. Labrys has one heck of an interesting backstory...

Seriously, I could listen to Hazama talk about evil things forever. Actually, everything is voice acted in BB. Acted well I might add. You can tell all the VAs had a shitload of fun with it. All that's missing is a narrator reading out the description bits.

I even play through Katawa Shoujo a decent amount (it's literally a straight line once you get the paths right. Shizune barely even has a "path" to begin with.) because the dialogue is REALLY good. Fuckin' Kenji is the funniest thing i've seen for a while now.

Hanako's route or GTFO. She's so cute!

Hanako steals all the hugs.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

Money . You gotta pay someone to read all those lines . In a 60-100 hour game like NNK , that amounts to a lot of cash .

Also , comon man , reading ain't that bad . That kinda proves how spoiled today's gamers are as they don't want to read . I personally thing voice acting in videogames is a massive waste of time and money , that could be better served somewhere else . The cost of AAA games are too high as it is , i personally think VA and (most) cinematics , are pointless . Cutting those out would save so much cash from the start.

This. Games from smaller devs have to make cutbacks to keep the budget under control. They can't blow millions of dollars like the Triple-A industry.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

I was going to post any of a hundred Youtube videos with bad, bad voice acting in JRPGs, but I'll simply let the fact that I can say that expression in complete honesty speak for itself. Also the one most people would bring up is actually from one of my favourite games. Maybe go watch one of the Unskippables of a game like Arc Rise Fantasia?

Limiting it to just the character introduction scenes and important plot events (or just to party members and important NPCs) is fine by me. Finding actors for every single NPC in a large world is a task not even the Elder Scrolls guys have ever undertaken, and for very little gain.

 

[Smertnik]

It's not like "in this day and age" voice actors work for free. I guess the developers decided that the budget would be better spent elsewhere. What exactly is wrong with having text anyway? You make it sound like it's a terrible inconvenience. I fail to see the problem, unless you have some kind of reading disorder.

 

[TehCookie]

As people said before a lot of JRPG are budget games, and voice actors are expensive. However I prefer having to read different lines than Skyrim with everyone having the same voice and the same three lines.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Different design philosophies mostly, so resources aren't really put into what they consider optional extras, if you look closer at JRPGs they are still doing very very old concepts.

While I don't mind a text system to fill in the blanks I do prefer voiced stuff over it, however a bad voice actor is inferior to text.
I would say with Ni No Kuni they lost the plot there, the two main characters are very well written and very well voiced to cut back on those is really bloody stupid.

 

[thesilentman]

You know, this is the reason that I prefer to read the manga versions of anime: pacing. In voices, the devs run the risk of dragging everything out and making it seem boring, while the reader can take their own pace while reading dialogue. That, and frankly I think voice acting is quite shit most of the time in games anyway.

The last game with good voice acting I've played would be.. would be... I dunno. I've now realized that voice acting in games really doesn't sit with me. :-/

 

[TJC]

I like reading so I guess there's no problem in that.

But especially in long and side-quest filled games... why would you even want to voice every line of dialogue anyway? Depending on the writing of the game and the quality of the voice acting, this might happen often
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=IetgyvyenGw#t=297s


I understand that voice acting is pretty awesome if done well but I still don't see it as necessity, especially in JRPGs which have long down times where you neither want nor need to listen to mindless jibber

 

[elvor0]

Because it's damn expensive. And until we have robot synthesisers capable of putting out voices that sound exactly like real life, text still has the advantage of being able to be edited whenever you want. You can add more choices (not exactly relevant in JRPGs), WRPGs like Fallout(the originals)and Baldur's Gate had tons of dialogue options, simply because it takes five minutes to add them in.

Flavour text (ala Baldurs Gate) is good, because then you get what the character sounds like and can read the rest of it in their voice, you still get voice acting, but it's much cheaper and still allows you to make edits without having to call the actor in again, pay them, record it, chop it up, stick it in, re lip-synch etc.

I read a lot anyway, and what I like to do is just think of a real life actor and just use their voice for them in my head, you can get a lot more personalized experience that way I feel, and especially for DC comics, the cast of Justice League etc have the same voice actors when I'm reading to when I'm watching.

 

[Worgen]

I prefer to read dialog, rather than hear it, especially oddly written dialog which jrpgs have in spades. You can't honestly tell me this scene would be more painful being just read as opposed to fully voiced.

 

[sextus the crazy]

Fuckin' Kenji is the funniest thing i've seen for a while now.

Tru dat. Best character in the game. Also, the fact that "to become one", the sex scene music, plays during his character ending is one of the funniest things in the game.

Hanako's route or GTFO. She's so cute!

I'm always achin' for the bacon.

OT: Because of expenses. Personally, I'm okay with the route intelligent systems took with Fire Emblem awakening, i.e. using short voice clips. There's still enough good voice acting to give personality to the characters, but it's still cost-effective.