That’s how VO is recorded for most things in the States, moreso when the script is a goddamn tome and the actors have to do hours of reactions and barks
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Yeah I think games have tended to suffer more than benefited from voice acting just because the dev process is so compartmentized and drawn out, shit tons of text really do tend to work better as just text
which probably accounts for why many of the best-liked videogame performances are just “one drifter guy carrying two thirds of the script by himself”
(360-era bioware generally had very good and enjoyable dialogue though, there’s a reason those games became the de facto new jRPGs as far as the kotaku set is concerned)
Certainly the argument could be made that most actual JRPG’s lost a heavy amount of abstraction they relied on when they added voiceacting. I can’t really draw off the top of my head the last time I heard a really good performance in a JRPG.
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mass effect, ironically
but if you’re talking about literal dragon quest style games developed in japan, I think that’s as much about the vastly different and usually terrible localization standards for those games as much as anything else. it’s too significant of a confounding factor to look at anime stuff and say “oh, well, you know videogame voice acting.” certainly it was one aspect of the significant dive in widespread appeal in the early 2000s.
my brother has bad taste in everything and the key marker of this is that he plays as manShep
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I don’t like male shepard’s default appearance at all but the VA is fine and you can have the should-be-canon liara pairing either way so
IIRC the old rule was that if you played as a renegade maleshep does a better asshole voice, and if you do a paragon shepard femshep has better reads overall.
I think more than any of the goofy poor production value what’s missing in MEA is compelling characterization. Part of this is that the alien races are still Star Trek-style ideological stereotypes, so you can’t have a new Krogan without coming off as Wrex 2.0, etc. I know there are a couple of new friendly races but I’d rather they make the colony ship human and have all new races on the potential colonies.
even mentioning paragon/renegade reminds me of how much more I like the third game than the first two, after they finally dialed back the manichaeism
ME2 tempts you at every turn to be a dick, though. I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t turn heel after being brought back from the dead by the space nazis.
I love meeting ME1 squadmates in 2 and they’re all, “man, what the fuck happened to you?”
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there’s a male shepard preset that looks sort of like hank hill with vaguely asian features and I gotta admit, he’s my man
This drives me nuts because both Spock and Worf break with this pattern as both of them are star trek ideological stereotypes under the influence of human upbringing. Like, it’d be better if more of these aliens stood in contrast to their respective species. A krogan that wasn’t just a standard issue klingon in mass effect paint.
There’s a little bit of what in retrospect is blatantly ripping off Worf’s arc in TNG, with Wrex separated from the culture on Tuchanka in ME2 and helping to navigate a succession crisis. Tali… also has a Sins of the Father side quest on the flotilla. Hmm.
nothing wrong with good source material
[quote=“Mikey, post:33, topic:4140, full:true”][quote=“Father.Torque, post:10, topic:4140, full:true”]Honestly this is a relief, there are too many good games for me to play and I’m glad I don’t have to bother with this one.
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Seconded
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I’ll third it as well.
Though it is amusing to watch this train wreck unfold. A few days ago before anyone had played it it was nothing but positive reviews and the lone voice of dissent at RPS and now a few days after everyone’s able to play it it’s all wow this game is poop huh.
The janky walking animation gifs are especially entertaining.
yeah, the eurogamer piece today sounded a little as though they felt the need to defend having been mostly positive up to now
it’s like people forget that the one thing mass effect really nailed before was the ensemble and if that’s busted I can’t see playing long enough to find out what they actually got right
“Oh my! Where is the bathroom?! I seem to have taken a huge dump in my pants!”
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other RPS guy is similarly dismayed:
I’m noticing some “give them a break over the animations, that stuff is extremely expensive and hard to get right” which I think partially speaks to just how intensely endearing a lot of people find these games & how resistant they are to hearing them criticized, but … it’s not just the animations, the whole thing comes across as this intensely bland production nightmare
nice
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I think the bad animation is likely due to some pretty gross mismanagement, but it’s kind of spectacular how bad it is. The artists have likely working 60 hour weeks for the past few years anyway, and know it’s bad, and that makes me a little sad for them.
Here’s a twitter thread with some of the more technical details.
some tidbits about bioware/ME:A to consider before wildly speculating about the animation issues:
— Fiora@AoD SantaClara (@FioraAeterna) March 16, 2017