I can generally second the recommendation given by Felix, i. e. switching to french if it is too much to deal with it in english - which is what i thought after the demo.
I mean, you can tell that the french have on one hand an animation-culture where they put some effort into dubs, and secondly that they generally localize movies, a good starting point for having lots of voice talent at your disposal. If you happen to like how a language “sounds”, even better!
It’s wild watching a scene with heated discussion in french, italian, spanish and german, because it never sounds the same!
In that regard, two games stand out which were the first games i’ve played in a specific language, first is Remember Me in french, second is Last Odyssey in Korean. Let FF7R be the first one for you!
double posting like it’s 1997/200x: needless to say, i am playing it in ze french, mon dieu!
Jessie’s VO actor > Tifá/Aërith atm, Cloud and Barrett are a draw, Monsieur Sephí pales a bit in comparison.
other thoughts so far:
Did FF7 have righthand traffic in the past as well?
Also, they seem pretty enamoured with trolleybusses in Midgar.
Seeing materias installed in the weapons is a nice touch.
I wonder how much the eco-terrorist <=> destruction of the world aspect is handled, after it doesn’t feel as far away as it did 20+ years ago.
Loveless is the name of a play, OK, but why does it state Loveless Theater on the front doors of the place where it is playing?
j/k, will maybe try it out for a bit, but when you started watching/playing something in a certain language, it’s ever so hard to switch inbetween, since you got used to the dub already. The interesting thing is that when you think ‘nah, i am just three hours in, had no time to get used to it’ , you tend to underestimate that it would be a few episodes into a, say, 11 episode run of a typical netflix Show where you switch to another lanugage.
Interesting Edge case:
Ze Man In Ze High Castle, since you got a mix of german, japanese, english, japanese accént and german akzent.
Interesting localization edge case in FF:
FF9, where they used several german dialects, something i was very sceptical about in the first hour, but got so used to that i forgot about it for a few years.
I played FFXV in German because I was planning a trip to Germany later that year. The only word I picked up from it was schön. It actually served me pretty well. Schön is a useful word.
Cindy in German is soo good. She’s husky. (It drives me crazy that her name’s not Cidney, though.
Anyway, I don’t think I’ll play this anytime soon, but I’m enjoying spoiling it for myself. The characters seem like realistic young people, which is a feeling I never got from the original. That may have just been me. Like, when I was 17 the fact that Tifa was a bartender seemed like such a sophisticated and adult thing. Now it just seems like a believable job for a young woman.
early on his English line readings sounded both too loud in the mix and divorced from the rest of the scene. his dialogue is actually pretty good and credible to sell his character in the world, which I don’t think was an easy feat, but I swear I couldn’t tell until I turned off the English voices
I always empathized with Barret because hell yeah am I hype about going on an adventure and saving the planet. I don’t want to be moody or nonchalant about it.
I do wish they’d been willing to cut maybe 20% of (each of, not the total of) these linear interquel dungeons – chapters 2 and 7 were both way too long, 7 in particular is like “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory” – but the sidequests themselves are all good
I don’t think so at all? I don’t really think he was in the original game either. but in the remake his personality is really fleshed out and three dimensional and endearing. idk.
I have to put myself in a frame of mind on the side of ha enthusiastic cartoon and uh not full caricature to enjoy most of his dialogue…it’s delivery not a problem with script imo. Almost everyone’s like this, their character va tuned to scenes for extremes (Cloud’s awkward subdued to full disinterest, Aerith’s sometimes grating cloying pitch, etc) but he’s almost always barking!
There’s a section where you control him solo and in that time alone, hearing more of his “suck on this” “hell YEAH” then lower personal banter, cool and he starts chilling out…but there’s also this blown up version of an angry graveled black man talking hyper street rough while no one else in Midgar really echoes it.
I still love this Barrett but personally woulda liked the indiscrete/dense of an eco-terrorist dialed back a bit.
I feel like his VA does a good job selling barret as someone who is warm caring and full of heart as well, you get a lot of the angry eco-terrorist in the first bombing mission but you quickly realize that’s just him wearing his leadership hat. part of his personality is that he likes to put on a show! I just feel like it ends up being specific and endearing enough to transcend the stereotype that it overlaps with. and much of that is just his original characterization from the original that played into specific black stereotypes as filtered by mid-90’s anime that were prevalent in that era. I guess my thing is that I feel there is a strong concerted effort in this remake to combat that specifically while staying as true as possible to his original portrayal and I honestly think they did a very good job.
Seems exacerbated by that aggravating Japanese game thing of running through the small pool of barks constantly, regardless of repetition, just so you know everyone’s cheering for you
I’ve heard a few friends expressing basically that
“for all of the jive shit Barret is SQEX wrote (albeit minor) black (women) characters that have some semblance of depth, great lines, and not a stereotype in sight.”
I switched to Japanese during most of the late game sidequests and might just be used to some of those VAs but found it smoother. Def back to Eng for the Shinra Building though, maybe French if I revisit chapters.
