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Estelle's secret identity wasn't even that, though. I mean her reveal scene was basically: Estelle: Everyone I have a secret I am a princess. Everyone (except Karol): Well yeah, doy. Karol: OMIGAWWWD REALLY!? I did like Karol though, because every time he tried to act like the stereotypical kid character the game poo poo all over him for it. Combat-wise he was slow, true, but the bottomless supply of tools he carried around gave him a lot more variety than, say, Presea.
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Sep 12, 2009 07:16
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Holy crap is that one guy wielding a double-bladed polearm that turns into dual pistols? I didn't think they could top Yeager's scythe-shotgun but here we are.
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Oct 11, 2009 21:45
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Giving Vesperia another go. My old save's gone, so I've gotta do it all again, secret missions and all. Hooray! I still love the game, though, way more so than other entries in the series. Despite the praise Abyss gets, it's probably one of my most hated JRPG's - not because of any serious technical issues (aside from, you know, all the loading problems) but because the cast was just reeking, fetid trash. Luke was three flavors of insufferable and just changed flavor as he went along. The mascot thing was terrible. The other characters were either bland or aggravating as hell. The villains were unremarkable and matched up so perfectly to the main cast they became impossible to take seriously, and Ion is unspeakably bad as a character. I want to know whose bright idea it was to make the game's big pure-hearted figurehead an ambiguously gendered little boy in a dress and then have his voice work done by a plank of wood with a lisp. The only so-so character was Jade, and even he's nothing special, just the usual snarky sarcastic type that tends to get lots of love because in bad games they tend to have the closest thing to an actual personality. Vesperia's great fun, though! So there's that.
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Nov 19, 2010 18:20
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Nate RFB posted:I really can't agree, Abyss is the only Tales game where I felt both the party and the villains were slightly more than cardboard cutouts and/or walking tropes and cliches. They weren't. Sorry bout that. The awful voice work probably only made matters worse, though. It's obvious that the lines were all recorded without context or interaction with the other actors, so all the dialogue is terribly lifeless and disjointed.
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Nov 19, 2010 18:27
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Pureauthor posted:Not liking the Abyss characters is fine. But none of the other Tales' characters are the least bit better in any significant sense. Maybe not more original, but Vesperia's are more likable and undeniably better voiced. I haven't played Symphonia in long enough to comment on those, but I don't remember any of the characters in that wearing me down like Abyss's did.
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Nov 19, 2010 18:42
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Virtually every RPG party ever from the 16-bit era onward is dysfunctional to some degree, so there's nothing special about Abyss in that respect. Abyss's party isn't exactly bad because the character arcs are uninteresting (though none of them were really all that impressive), it was bad because the characters had zero chemistry - in part due to, again, the terrible voice acting, and in part due to Luke being such a weak lead. Either he's whining up the place, obsessed about his atonement, or acting mopey and ineffectual. And since none of the other characters are really all that likable on their own terms, eventually one starts to question why they're hanging around each other so much. FFXIII has that same problem with party cohesion, I think.
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Nov 19, 2010 18:52
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Nate RFB posted:Maybe I'm just comparing to the awful English voicework I was used to prior like FFX, but I remember being fairly impressed with the dub for both Abyss and Vesperia. FFX is way worse than Abyss, but Abyss is still really bad. If you go back and listen to some of the cutscenes, then everyone sounds like they're saying their lines in separate rooms, which only gets worse when you take into account horrible voices like Mieu's and Ion's. A huge part of what made me like Vesperia so much is that the character's conversations actually sounded like conversations. It was especially refreshing coming off the heels of Abyss.
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Nov 19, 2010 19:00
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cant wait to post!! posted:How can anybody think those character designs look good? jesus christ. The girl looks very silly but there's nothing that objectionable about the guy's outfit (for a JRPG, at least).
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Feb 2, 2011 01:11
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FighterKnuckles posted:Nope. I've known about it for both times I played Vesperia, but never once have I seen any clue about it, any hints, certainly not where to find it. You get it by sleeping in the inn a bunch of times in the desert town, Mantaic, I think it's called, before going out to look for Phaeroh. There, answer given.
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Feb 8, 2011 03:53
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Samurai Sanders posted:I know this is said every time this comes up, but Luke does change, more dramatically than any JRPG lead I have ever seen. Yeah, he goes from intolerably whiny, to boring, to boring and intolerably whiny. Abyss had one of the worst casts I've seen in a JRPG, and I played Star Ocean 3.
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Feb 21, 2011 19:29
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mistaya posted:Jade makes up for anything you don't like about Abyss's cast. No he doesn't. He's the dry, sarcastic character who pokes fun at how horrible the rest of the writing is. His type is ten a penny and he's not even a particularly remarkable example.
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Feb 21, 2011 21:01
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Some Numbers posted:Unless you're referring to the fact that it was a Mystic Arte, it's not exactly Jade's Indignation. Indignation is a Tales series staple. Though hers in particular is the only one to use Jade's animation and incantation. I think.
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Mar 9, 2011 18:47
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Skychrono posted:So how's Xilia's plot? What does it best compare to? Symphonia's plot was garbage, Abyss was even worse. Vesperia wasn't anything near spectacular, but at least it was fun. Symphonia sort of had that, too, if only because it reveled in its cliches.
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Apr 21, 2011 22:45
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Samurai Sanders posted:What did Namco have to do with Enslaved? Yeah, that was a Team Ninja effort. Their track record with games is less than good anyway, so it probably wasn't part of an outreach effort or anything.
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May 2, 2011 17:54
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Ledneh posted:In Vesperia, does getting access to Fatal Strikes and higher Overlimit levels change how I should approach combat in general? Like, should I be playing as normal but just do FSes as they come up for free damage, or actively seeking them out, or chaining them (whatever that actually is)? Save my overlimit gauge and go bonza on a boss, or keep using it one at a time for link encounters? etc If you ever start grinding for materials, then you'll have to learn which Fatal Strikes increase item drop chances and try to trigger them on the enemies you want. Otherwise, just kill poo poo as you normally would. also Ion is flat-out the worst character in a game loaded with them and responsible for most if not all of the tedious, meandering political garbage and backtracking that clogs the plot like sludge in a drain, and my hate for him burns like a tiny sun
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May 17, 2011 06:13
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Abyss's characters had no more thought put into them than anyone else in the mainline series of Tales games, sometimes even less, and a few of the explanations for quirks (like Guy's gynophobia) were howlingly retarded. Then, because it bears repeating, you had Ion. There's just really no end of bad things that can be said about that kid.
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Jul 11, 2011 19:26
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Momomo posted:Anise wants money because her parents are ridiculously gullible And you actually typed these out and posted these thinking they were somehow above the bar for JRPG's, or even the mainline Tales games. There's a loving bizarre disconnect in the minds of Abyss fans, I swear. Especially Guy's. That's what you point at when you want an example of completely ridiculous mood whiplash. And then you have the villains, which are all just the C-list shonen cliche of every major villain being some near-perfect mirror image or major relation of every major hero. It's downright comical.
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Jul 11, 2011 21:01
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Nate RFB posted:They honestly kind of are! What Tales game has did this part better? Vesperia? Phantasia? Symphonia? Please. I love the game but Vesperia probably had the shallowest cast outside of Yuri I've ever seen in a Tales game. I don't even remember any defining characteristics of Symphonia, other than Fantastic Racism involving elves and one character being a little girl except wait she's actually old. Shallowness is fine if it suits the game's purposes. Abyss tried to create depth in its characters and hosed it up in basically every possible way, so what you got were a bunch of colorful, woodenly acted stereotypes who took regular turns into insufferable melodrama and ridiculous backstories. And the real killer was, none of those elaborate flaws or backdrops made any of the characters more tolerable in the least. Luke was still two different flavors of whiny bitch throughout the game, Tear still a dead-eyed cipher who would occasionally say "it's so cute" with all the emotion of a coma patient, Anise was Anise, and Natalia was a vaguely green placeholder where an actual character should be. The character that gets the most praise is Jade, because he's the smirking sarcastic guy that's showed up in dozens of games before. Then you had the terrible loading times and anemic political backstory and fonons and backtracking upon backtracking and yeesh. Abyss was a wretched game.
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Jul 11, 2011 21:17
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Artix74 posted:Actually, I thought I read that some of the voice acting is getting cut since Namco's too cheap to shell out for the 4 GB cartridges and is going with the 2 GB ones instead, and the PS2 original is something like 4.6 GB. Yeah, Abyss is a game that wouldn't be hurt at all by losing its VA work, unless you really, really like to hear Yuri Lowenthal scream, in which case you should probably buy a .hack//GU title and pass out from happiness. Purple D. Link posted:Oh, that makes sense. I either forgot about them warning him or wasn't paying attention. Their warnings were all incredibly vague and anyone who knew Luke for more than two days should've known they'd skate right over his head without intense, excruciating detail. So it was basically another forced attempt at drama. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Jul 11, 2011 |
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Jul 11, 2011 21:42
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S-Alpha posted:This conversation is making me realize something: The Tales series doesn't really have fans, does it? It just has abiders. The last Tales game to be released was Vesperia, and that was three years ago. The series in general gets shafted by its publishers often enough to make actual releases extremely scarce, so everyone's basically running on nostalgia fumes. That said, Vesperia probably had one of the functionally best scripts of the bunch, basically equivalent to a popcorn movie, with a plot and characters that were refreshingly free of bullshit. It only suffered by offering easy outs to what could have been actual dramatic conflicts at several points, but I'd prefer that to Abyss, which did whatever it could to make everyone navel-gaze for another half hour. quote:The empire is ok. Someone gets betrayed. The empire is the bad guy. Someone important dies. Someone knowingly/unknowingly instigates a catastrophe. A bunch of kids have to save the day. Also, RACISM
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Jul 11, 2011 21:51
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SpazmasterX posted:I'm not quite sure of what I'm looking at here. Looks like they're showing off the remix issues of their games. I've always hated that bullshit. At least the only other serious perpetrator is Square-Enix.
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Jul 22, 2011 01:12
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Amppelix posted:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB6o6FAgVyI If you stand in front of a recording studio mirror and say his name three times, he appears behind you and voices all the manliest or silliest characters on the production, depending on circumstances. But when he is done, everyone goes to jail. It is a dark and Faustian pact.
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Jul 22, 2011 18:55
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Hey, how many people knew that one of the near-identical lance-wielding knight enemies in ToV only shows up in Baction for about twenty minutes out of the whole game? I sure didn't! And I can't even Youtube the 100% monster completion scene. This game is so cruel.
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Apr 8, 2012 04:03
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OneDeadman posted:You had to break the guys guard broken, THEN use the skill. Hope you don't attack him afterward thinking that you have not broken guard and take him out of the Guard Break stun. That's because that's also incorrect. You have to Guard Break the boss, and then wait. He'll stagger, and then drop into a stance where he clutches his chest. That's when you have to hit him with Rain. Most people panic as soon as he Guard Breaks and hit him within the same second, which knocks him out of his wounded stance and resets the whole thing. The guides never mention this and it's impossible to figure it out from videos unless you're looking out for it. On top of that, a single Rain won't be enough to crack the residual shield he has after Guard Break, and by the time you manage to shoot two of them, he'll have probably recovered. So your best best would be to set everyone to No TP/Defend, pop OL2 with Yuri, hit the boss until he guards, and then pound on him with Destruction Field until his guard breaks. Then you switch to Raven, fire off the rest of your OL, wait for the boss to clutch his chest, and then start mashing Rain and hoping to hell you don't miss. It's just such a disproportionate amount of preparation and luck compared to every other Secret Mission. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Apr 8, 2012 |
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Apr 8, 2012 16:47
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alcharagia posted:I must not be familiar with this one, I just know about the hilariously awful story. Yeah, all of us non-Japanese readers got a painfully in-depth look at Patty through the currently running LP and she's a loving atrocious character who borderline poisons every scene she appears in, and her plot is driveling, barely-coherent nonsense that's completely divorced from the game proper. And this is the Tales series we're talking about, which has never exactly made revolutionary writing or characterization its watchword.
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Jun 4, 2013 00:38
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Endorph posted:I didn't mind her? She's not exactly stellar but 'poisons every scene she touches' is a bit... much. Squeaky loli pirate girl whose dialogue consists of her acting "cute" in the most grating way possible, angsting over her breathtakingly stupid backstory, or expressing her wishes to rock the lead character's body ('til the break of dawn). Gets a little hard to take!
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Jun 4, 2013 00:46
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Volt Catfish posted:So she's a clone of...Anise? Horror of horrors.
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Jun 4, 2013 00:50
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Wind God Sety posted:That's great and all but that's just one person's opinion. Or a thousand people's opinion, it doesn't really matter, it's an opinion. The preference of the CC system to the TP one is just that, a preference. I have no idea how anything you said would lead to the conclusion that Graces objectively has the best combat out of the series. What does it even mean to have the objectively best combat in the series? If we're being oh so objective here, what parameters are we measuring? You talk about the fun of combat, or how nice the combo system feels, but guess what? Those things are subjective. And that's great if you like Graces' combat, but just because you can explain why you like it better than another game's combat doesn't make it objectively better. It's because one person is establishing a set of empirical criteria and rational arguments for their opinion, whereas you just keep screaming SUBJECTIVE/OBJECTIVE and tedious rhetorical questions into the sky in the hope that it'll make everyone else have an epileptic fit or something, I don't even know.
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Jun 4, 2013 04:58
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The Taint Reaper posted:IS there anything I need to know before I play vesperia? Like missible poo poo and such. Taint Reaper, this is mean.
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Aug 29, 2015 16:18
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Abyss is garbage from a dumpster butt and one of the few RPG's I couldn't even get through halfway. The only tolerable character of the lot is Jade and even he's completely unremarkable.
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Sep 18, 2015 14:40
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Sounds like I might actually pick this series up again after Vesperia. Looking forward to playing with a sidequest FAQ open at all times. Memories~
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Aug 26, 2016 14:40
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CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:A villain crossover game. I forget, did Duke actually do anything evil for the whole of Vesperia? I just remember him being all cryptic and enigmatic on the sidelines for most of the game until he went "all right, that's quite enough of that" and went off to hit the end-of-the-world button.
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Sep 4, 2016 05:57
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voltcatfish posted:Were the skits in vesperia voiced? I don't remember actually They were voiced and they were perfect. I need to give Abyss another swing one of these days, I tried it years ago and it's probably one of my most hated games. This thread is littered with my shitposting about it.
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Sep 7, 2016 00:17
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Chaotic Flame posted:Why? A lot of people knock it for technobabble (fonons aren't that complicated) and maybe a hard-to-like party dynamic early game, but otherwise I thought most people liked Abyss. It was my favorite until Graces came out only because I like Graces' combat to the extreme and the Malik/Richard power hour. Hated all the characters (Ion and Anise in particular), the voice acting grated, the backstories were inane, the graphics and music were bland, the combat did nothing for me, the script up to where I played revolved around a ton of tedious backtracking and manufactured conflict caused by failures of communication. Part of it was hype backlash because these forums talked it up a lot even back then, but at the time it was easily my least favorite Tales game and pretty near the bottom of all JRPG's I've played.
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Sep 7, 2016 00:32
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Endorph posted:conflict caused by failures of communication is extremely true to life and not manufactured at all, imo. It's true to life but it's bad writing. It doesn't help that Luke is (justifiably) an unlikable twerp for a good chunk of the game, so most of the side cast hates him too and that just makes the whole party's chemistry this unpleasant trudge until he gets his haircut. Vesperia was great because Yuri was great and made everyone else great by proxy. I think I finally hung it up when I got spoiled on the reason for Guy's gynophobia. It was such a silly grimdark excuse for such an awful gimmick. e: actually now that I think back on it, all the characters' gimmicks were kind of unbearable. Luke at least had a consistent arc, but Tear just monotoned "so cute" at anything nearby, Anise liked money (I think?) for some tragic reason, Guy yelped and cringed away at ladies, Jade was factory-grade snarky at everything. This is why I should probably give it another go, all I seem to remember is the worst bits. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Sep 7, 2016 |
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Sep 7, 2016 00:44
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Endorph posted:how? The cast withholds information from Luke well past the point of reason or sense, which lets Van sucker him into making a part of the world fall away or however that went, which only makes the cast even more pissy at Luke for events they themselves caused. None of these people acted like friends for the first stretch of the game, they were just badly acted sacks of cliches forced to exist in the same general space as each other and it got tiring for me. It doesn't help that I played it after Vesperia, which for all its other faults had one of the most likable casts in the series. Even Rita is a joy and she's got exactly two personality traits, "I'm smart" and "gently caress you." Motto posted:They got disgusted with Luke for throwing a tantrum where he denies any culpability for his actions. And rightly so! Everyone who knew better kept him in the dark so he went by the word of the not-at-all suspicious guy he grew up with. When the literal overgrown seven-year old is showing more self-awareness than the rest of the cast you've got some problems. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Sep 7, 2016 |
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Sep 7, 2016 00:49
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Endorph posted:also, luke is not seven years old. Isn't one of the big twists about him supposed to be that he's an artificial human who's only actually been around for seven years or so, explaining most of his mental immaturity?
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Sep 7, 2016 00:56
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It's probably just safe to say on the whole that most of the things people liked about Abyss had the opposite effect for me. The parts of the script some found ambitious and clever I just thought were forced and melodramatic, and the darker parts of the plot kept dropping into farce. The triple whammy of Act I Luke, Mieu, and Ion didn't help my initial impressions either.
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Sep 7, 2016 01:08
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Endorph posted:the things you liked about vesperia didn't work for me It's still so bizarre that one of Vesperia's pivotal plot points has Yuri unironically repeating word-for-word a character motivation he openly rebuked a few hours ago and it's never pointed out by the game itself. Vesperia's character interactions were aces but it feels like two different scripts awkwardly welded together.
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Sep 7, 2016 01:13
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Laura Bailey could do a great Velvet. I don't actually know anything about Velvet, but Laura Bailey could voice-act a table lamp and make it the best performance in the script.
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Sep 7, 2016 03:47
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