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So, yeah, the FFX English VA problem is less about having bad acting and more about having bad direction. Or, well, it's not even that, really, just that the localisation process was poorly constructed, probably, in a way that gave rise to problems. The actors were great, mostly. The thing was that Square had only just gotten the hang of their localisation style, and had pretty much just discovered voice acting in the first instance, and everyone was just kinda winging it. FFX had a pretty decent localisation in the abstract, but if I had to guess I'd say it didn't occur to the people localising it that someone else would decide the voice lines were going to have to match the animations that closely, the two departments involved never spoke to eachother, and nobody realized until the actors were in the booths, and someone had to tell James Arnold Taylor that he had half a second to say "with Yuna by my side", and, well, he's a professional, he just did it and collected the check, thought it was funny, and went home. Contrast FFVII-R, which had equally insane a set of working conditions but felt like one of the most natural localisations ever made. The requirement was still to fit all deliveries within 0.2s of the original Japanese timings. They could cheat at certain things a little - Square have some bananas procedural animation tech for Unreal Engine, including auto-generating lip flaps, facial movements (eg eyebrow arching, nostril flaring) and even stance shifting, all from just an audio file, but they knew from the beginning what the constraints all were and were able to write everything around it in a way that ensured some sanity throughout, such that the writers had some awareness the whole time of what the actors were going to have to do.
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Feb 12, 2021 16:55
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 04:23 |
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Yeah maybe I'm just finally losing my memory but I could swear the trials are and always have been revisitable later (especially considering the Destruction Spheres), it was just that in the International Version there happens to be a small landmine of a change which renders it very much in your interests to clear everything out the first time although strictly speaking it's still as possible as it ever was to revisit.
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Feb 19, 2021 16:34
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It's me, I'm the guy who'll go to bat for Spirits Within. It was good. I mean okay it wasn't amazing and it was a bit hokey in places but it resonated and its CG was a decade ahead of its time. I'd love to see the alternate universe where it didn't bomb and Aki Ross actually became the "virtual actress" she was intended to be and probably wound up saving us from having to have Final Fantasy XIII.
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Feb 25, 2021 02:23
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I make this joke about once a year and it becomes a little bit less of a joke every time I make it; Square Enix should partner up with Sports Interactive and produce Blitzball Manager.
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Mar 5, 2021 01:32
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:I know Blitzball is some sort of meme, but is it actually fun to play or is it really stupid? It's a decently interesting action-rpg but it's also very plodding and doesn't really hold up well as being a good simulation of a supposedly blisteringly paced contact sport.
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Mar 5, 2021 22:36
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I could stand to see the existing updates amended if it's not a pain to do.
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Mar 7, 2021 00:03
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I'd have to double check the tables to confirm but I have a vague recollection of the whole joke with the Aurochs being that they're poo poo and level like poo poo until the tail end of the curve at which point they just hulk out and become stupid good, or something. I remember Keepa secretly being one of the best keepers in the game.
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Mar 8, 2021 23:11
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FFXIII is really goddamn weird! I honestly kinda love the game part of it, in the abstract, if you separate it out from the context of its weird thirty-hour-tutorial framing, it's real neat, and unique (I await with anticipation Christine Love's upcoming game Get in the Car, Loser primarily because the playable part of it is really obviously a gigantic love letter to FFXIII). But every narrative part of it is dumb as gently caress. It's so stupid. Even when it manages to make sense, it does so accidentally, and it's a mess of disconnected beats hanging together by the flimsiest threads and the worst game design methodologies. It's well documented that nobody at Square Enix had any goddamn clue what this game was actually going to be like before they were ordered to throw together a demo to release alongside some other thing one time, and they had no idea what the story was but were going whole hog on making assets and FMVs anyway, there was famously enough cut content for a whole other videogame, which, shockingly enough, they went and made! FFX has a lot in common with FFXIII in terms of its rigidly linear structure, but, it's like night and day w.r.t. vision, like, FFX flows, it's paced, it was obviously planned this way from the start, all the bits of its design flow into eachother, it comes together! Even when there are bits of it I don't like, it's apparent enough that at least it was deliberately that way and I'm having an honest difference of opinion with the designers, unlike FFXIII which is the way it is more or less by a very convoluted accident and probably didn't have much of a plan for me to have issues with.
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Mar 12, 2021 01:45
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The Jecht Post technique eliminates two posts from a page so you can snipe far more easily.
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Mar 13, 2021 21:56
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The real Blitzball galaxy brain move at this point is to walk the whole way to the boat and sail back to Kilika to recruit Tatts. ...I mean this way seems practical too, but where's the pointless style?
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Mar 13, 2021 22:37
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Raise this in the Tech Fort and I guarantee you you won't get 4 hours before someone gets Avisynth to do this for sequential files in a directory.
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Mar 14, 2021 23:48
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The thing that gets me about all the outrageous FFX designs is that they exist in the same game as Yuna, whose design is a triumph of the marriage of ceremony and practicality, which tells you a little about the world just by looking at her, which doesn't in the slightest seem to jar or contradict or make you scratch your head.
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Mar 16, 2021 12:41
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Falconier111 posted:Wait a second... Hey, this is about all I really do around here anyway.
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Mar 20, 2021 03:56
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Falconier111 posted:
Feel like something got pretty mangled here. FFX is one of those fascinating examples of a game that got a lot of extremely mechanical propositions extremely right but was brutally let down by the parts of the game outside the battle system. Oh yes, it's the unskippable cutscenes complaint. This is a game that wants you to fail and retry and learn an encounter and has the design chops to make it's battle-puzzles work as things you can satisfyingly solve, and if it were only a matter of the bits between the battle transition and the victory theme it would be a smash hit, but alas; they couldn't escape the gravity of the game's save system and cutscenes, and now the one thing everybody remembers about the game is how poo poo it was to lose to certain bosses that shall go unnamed for now but which definitely are a plurality. Similarly, the Sphere Grid is a decent idea primarily let down by the foibles of its practical operation. It's a fun visual representation of an otherwise aggressively ordinary progression system. It can eventually be taken to some fun places that kind of hazily align with other Final Fantasy job system paradigms where everybody can be crossclassing a little, but (expert grid aside) it takes far too long to open up and doesn't open up enough until you hit the literal actual endgame, and there rapidly comes a point where there just isn't anywhere interesting to take the system other than its logical and obscene conclusion, the point everything has always been trending towards, and there's not even anything interesting enough about that point to justify the effort it takes to get there.
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Apr 19, 2021 13:06
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You mean, before Jyscal. Look, he was him murderer about to force Yuna to marry him. We only did what we had to do.
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vyelkin posted:The one thing that's really unforgivable is that when they did the remaster they didn't program in skippable cutscenes. This sucks but I know just enough about video games and software to sympathise. Skipping an in-engine cutscene is a very deceptively complicated proposition and very difficult to reverse-engineer into a production that did not originally support it.
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Apr 19, 2021 23:10
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