Y'all gotta get over voice acting

[AnonymousSpeed]

I swears to yas, everywhere I look, I sees people talkin' about voice acting. One man says, "I can't believe this game doesn't have voice acting". Another says, "this game should get with the times and add voice acting". Then I just feel my skin start to puncture itself from beneath.

Voice acting is fine if you're making Halo or Uncharted or, y'know, something with faux-movie cutscenes. In those cases it's a strictly necessary part of the presentation. Man though, there's nothing I want to do in Three Houses, yet sitting through voice acting stapled onto low-budget presentation to make it appear fancy is one thing I'm especially glad to not be doing.

If you're going to have no character animation (i.e you are a support conversation), don't have any voice-acting. The cutscenes in Fates, the actual pre-rendered stuff where there's cinematography and the characters have facial expressions on the models? Those need to have voice acting. It's uncanny otherwise.

What baffles me is how many people look at these totally different levels of presentation and try to Frankenstein parts from one onto the other. Having full voice acting over a support conversation? That's uncanny too. Having the same handful of English dub voice actors read to me what I can already read with my eyes, except slower than I can read it, does not improve my gaming experience.

The thing about acting is that it's supposed to include, y'know, mannerisms? An actor has to emote physically as well as verbally. If you can see the character and hear the character at the same time, you expect expression in both their voice and body. Watching someone kind of emote verbally when there's no physical emoting creates such an awkward dissonance that it renders the entire thing, frankly, cringe. It feels bad to look at. It's awkward, it's unwieldy, but by God is it popular.

Voice acting should provide some material benefit compared to me just reading text on the screen. For an actual cutscene? No doubt it does, even if it's mediocre voice acting. Watching a movie on mute with subtitles can prove that. For a support conversation though? The dialogue in Pokemon? It actually makes things worse than reading on a screen. It's like the physical emoting is on mute with subtitles.

Can you imagine an entire book that was almost entirely dialogue, but the non-dialogue parts were written in tiny little sentence fragments, no words longer than four letters and no more than one adjective per paragraph? No matter how beautiful that dialogue is, you're going to get a dissonant and distracted final product.

I don't like it.

You know what game has better voice acting that Three Houses?

Mighty no. 9.

Yeah, the long-forgotten attempt at a spiritual successor to Mega Man that was unpopular back in 2016, if any of you remember that.

You wanna know why?

Well, first of all, most of them play during gameplay. It would be asinine to have to stop jumping and shooting to read text on the screen, or to try and do so while dodging enemy fire. The dialogue being spoken allows the game to preserve flow, even while doing it's little character interactions. Are they well-written? Question for another time.

Even during the pre-boss dialogue, where the two characters stand still and talk, it's more bearable because it's so brief. And the pre-boss dialogue are still better animated that the supports in Three Houses (being a lot more zoomed out may help).

There are some extremely awkward "proper" in-engine cutscenes, mostly near the beginning and end of the game, which are about on par with Three Houses supports on a purely technical level. However, since the game is colorful and has charming, exaggerated character designs, these cutscenes end up being a lot more aesthetically pleasing.

Don't forget that the camera in Mighty no. 9 is capable of standing still and seems to have been placed by an actual human being, unlike Three Houses, where it feels like the camera is controlled by an algorithm designed to make sure it's constantly panning.

[Fabulously Olivier]

If it's a big budget game that can reasonably ship millions of copies, I should expect voice acting. (Especially if your game barely has any dialogue - POKEMON.)

 

If it's a game where localized voice acting would have notably improved the user experience, it's a valid criticism regardless of how niche the franchise is. Having to read backlogs during a heated battle in Dynasty Warriors because subtitles just aren't compatible with a real time action game? Kind of an issue.

[vanguard333]

I agree and disagree. Voice acting has its pros and cons, and I think people tend to forget the cons.

Voice acting has to be localized, and the localization is generally constrained by all the problems dubbing usually has; I distinctly remember a lot of people who wanted voice acting in Zelda games changing their tune when Breath of the Wild released and the quality of its localized voice acting was... mixed. Another major con is that voice acting takes up a lot more space than people realize; that isn't as much of a problem nowadays thanks to greater space being available, but it's still something that has to be considered from the developers' perspective.

Voice acting needs to be a big enough improvement to the user experience to outweigh the costs; that I do agree with, and it does generally need to fit the rest of the presentation.

 

However, one thing I think people tend to forget when discussing voice acting: people tend to act like voice acting must be all or nothing, and that's just not true. The presentation in Pokémon games for example has reached the point where complete silence + text is off-putting, but it isn't to the point where full voice acting would be better. The solution I think for Pokémon would be to introduce partial voice acting like Fire Emblem Awakening: enough to give the characters a voice without the voice actors reciting the whole text.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Feels like your gripes are not with voice acting but specifically with Three Houses' support presentation. And yeah, it's got some problems. The actual story scenes suffer from the same issues (except I remember there being less panning?). God isn't it the funniest thing how your students all just step into and out of frame simultaneously? Another problem unique to Three Houses (and wow I hope it stays unique to Three Houses) is the Monastery. The entire game takes place in this one location. Of course you'll get tired of its various rooms.

But surely you don't think a lack of voice acting would improve any of these scenes? It would still be character models doing their preset animations at each other except now you have to imagine their tone of voice. Instead of putting the controller down with auto advance, you have to sit there, at least one hand on the controller, tapping the A button to advance. Your eyes glaze over as you read the dialogue. You can't even check your phone while this is going on. Does Fire Emblem work without voice acting? Of course it does. I still enjoy previous games very much, but the voice acting is a nice treat. It really brings these characters to life and justifies the bloated scripts that would have been unacceptable otherwise. 

There may be something to what you're saying regarding other games though. There are some otherwise good games out there with garbage presentation. Though it's dubious to say that the voice acting is specifically the problem, I remember being bored out of my mind with Xenoblade 2. They have to make every gosh darned dialogue its own cutscene. Using this same library of pre-made character animations and nearly no regard for cinematography. These should not have been cutscenes. A lower budget, better paced rpg would have these as party chats. Or your party members would stand around as highlighted NPCs you can walk up and talk to at your own discretion. But I feel like the only way the voice acting might be the problem is if the developers already shelled out for all this voice talent and are committed to using every bit of it in ways that unfortunately waste the player's time.

I haven't played FF7 Remake, but I've seen clips of them doing the Uncharted Walk and Talk thing that has been standard among western games for a decade. That's way better than breaking the pace with yet another cutscene, and probably easier on the development budget too since you don't need to call in the cutscene director for every dialogue now. Maybe JRPGs are finally catching up. Mighty No. 9, same thing. Walking and Talking. Video games just flow better that way for the exact reasons you point out. The beauty of this medium is that the player goes at their own pace. And yeah the dark side to cutscenes is that it ignores this advantage. 

[Yexin]

as an average JRPG enjoyer, i love when a JRPG hits the west and they pay for an english voice acting (italian ones are pure wishful thinking and that's why to this day i still wonder who's responsible for Radiant Dawn's italian voice acting)
it makes me think there's someone, out there, that just like me actually cares about JRPGs being marketed outside Japan

[Bylift]

Ironic title to this thread.

[Florete]

No.

[Punished Dayni]

Yeah, a lot of the VA issues here stem from a poor presentation of scenes in aspects beyond dialogue. It also doesn't help that FE's not been that strong with physical emoting of character portraits in earlier titles either, certainly not utilising it much outside of emoting in character faces, though this should be handled better in 3H as well, I note Raph pushing himself forward to scream louder for example.

I also wonder if this should go into the 3H subforum, but not the point.

3 hours ago, vanguard333 said:

However, one thing I think people tend to forget when discussing voice acting: people tend to act like voice acting must be all or nothing, and that's just not true. The presentation in Pokémon games for example has reached the point where complete silence + text is off-putting, but it isn't to the point where full voice acting would be better. The solution I think for Pokémon would be to introduce partial voice acting like Fire Emblem Awakening: enough to give the characters a voice without the voice actors reciting the whole text.

How would you feel about partial dialogue/using clips to suggest intonation outside major scenes? I've seen it elsewhere and I'm a bit unsure at times about it.

52 minutes ago, Yexin said:

as an average JRPG enjoyer, i love when a JRPG hits the west and they pay for an english voice acting (italian ones are pure wishful thinking and that's why to this day i still wonder who's responsible for Radiant Dawn's italian voice acting)

The 2000's was kinda alright for that relative to how many games came out (Well, for European languages), I really don't see it as much these days.

It's not even for me, just to have that option for more non-English speakers would be good.

[vanguard333]

23 minutes ago, Dayni said:

How would you feel about partial dialogue/using clips to suggest intonation outside major scenes? I've seen it elsewhere and I'm a bit unsure at times about it.

I'm not sure what you mean by this; are you referring to stuff like what Awakening did (actual words/phrases), or what a lot of the Zelda games did (voice grunts and such)?

[Punished Dayni]

1 minute ago, vanguard333 said:

I'm not sure what you mean by this; are you referring to stuff like what Awakening did (actual words/phrases), or what a lot of the Zelda games did (voice grunts and such)?

I was considering either scenario, or both depending on the context (Like, does a sigh count as a word? It'd give intent on a sentence, but I don't think it'd be a word.)

[vanguard333]

Just now, Dayni said:

I was considering either scenario, or both depending on the context (Like, does a sigh count as a word? It'd give intent on a sentence, but I don't think it'd be a word.)

Honestly, for a lot of games, I do think that that is the best option. For instance, I do not think the pre-BOTW Zelda games would be improved with full voice acting; the limited voice acting those games used was for the best, and I honestly think that that's what Legends: Arceus needed; not full voice-acting, but limited voice-acting instead to fill the silence.

I'd say a sigh counts as an expression, not a word.

[Punished Dayni]

2 minutes ago, vanguard333 said:

Honestly, for a lot of games, I do think that that is the best option. For instance, I do not think the pre-BOTW Zelda games would be improved with full voice acting; the limited voice acting those games used was for the best, and I honestly think that that's what Legends: Arceus needed; not full voice-acting, but limited voice-acting instead to fill the silence.

I'd say a sigh counts as an expression, not a word.

I'm mixed about this. Obviously full voice work is a large labour, but I think there's strong enough pool of people involved that pushing in that direction should certainly be less of a technical issue, one that I personally think FE has benefited from choosing to utilise to a larger extent. Most of the LoZ series wouldn't outright benefit from it to the point I'd insist upon it, most don't use any from my recollection (though I've more experience with 2D Zelda, so I could be wrong there). Probably the place I could most see it from what I've played is in Twilight Princess for Zelda and Midna's dialogue heavy scenes.

As for the sigh, I wasn't wanting to count it as a grunt. Should have made that clearer there.

[Original Alear]

You're crazy and overly dogmatic (not in a particularly bad way). The voices in Three Houses are great to listen to and I like hearing the lines being read. That's all that really matters. However, I wouldn't have suffered from heartache if they had never been included. This is the first FE game I can particularly remember wanting to hear the the VA'ing on a regular basis, though. Oh, actually, Echoes has pretty good voices. Azura and Gunther have great voices too.

However, I didn't play Mighty No. 9, so I'm not going to criticize it. But I actually enjoyed the clumsiness of Three Houses as being kind of funny. The first thing I remember really enjoying is when I was speeding through reading some text towards the start, Flayn comes in and a music theme starts playing for her, then she leaves a short time later and the music goes back to normal.

[Jotari]

Bad presentation is going to be bad presentation with or without dialogue. Comparatively, would I like to hear Tibarn speak when playing Radiant Dawn? Hell yeah, I'm sure they could have added lot's to him with a proper voice (yeah I know he has like a one voiced line in one cutscene, neither here nor there).  And Radiant Dawn's presentation isn't even that amazing, but I think voice acting would improve it.

On the other hand, not everything does strictly need voice acting and I don't want to see it as a criticism if it lacks it. People seem to be bringing up Pokemon as an example, and maybe it's just because I haven't played a game since X, but it seems like an experience that absolutely doesn't need voice acting.

One series I'm quite torn on for voice acting is Ace Attorney. On the one hand it has such crazy fun characters that giving them a voice could be a lot of fun. On the other hand, for a lot of the game you're listening to the same piece of dialogue and presenting different pieces of evidence for it, which would be irritating if voiced. Even if you could interrupt or skip over, I think for the cross examinations at least it should be switched off. But then you get a little bit of dissonance, especially swapping back to any voiced sections. So it's probably for the best Ace Attorney stays mute.

[Interdimensional Observer]

9 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Does Fire Emblem work without voice acting? Of course it does. I still enjoy previous games very much, but the voice acting is a nice treat.

This is how I often feel about voice acting. For many a game that either strictly don't need VAs at all and it wouldn't be weird, I'd be fine without it, though having it is nice. The same is true for games for which I don't expect voice acting for all non-main-plot written dialogue from.

 

---

I do have one minor issue with voice acting, that being the pool of competent video game English voice actors is a tad limited in size. Yuri Lowenthal has voiced how many heroes at this point? I can't create good fake voices in my head, but yet another Yuri might "flattens" a character a little for me by making them sound identical to others I know. This can be particularly possibly a tad detrimental if someone shares a VA with a character I dislike, or if this new character is bad and impinges on the voice of someone I do like. I am capable of keeping everyone separate and judge them independently, but there is an additional effort not otherwise there when shared VAs of a mixed bag kind happen. Although, shared VA stuff also has the potential to sometimes be neat, I'll admit that.

[henrymidfields]

Actually, for the first time around, I'd rather listen to full voice acting for support conversations and the like. I think it adds to the characteristics, so I'd rather that we have full voice acting where its feasible. Though there could be a simplified toggle option a la FE Awakening available for those who wants to skim over the conversations (the ones in 3H did take ages to get through...), or we could limit it to A/S-supports.

But it does kind of sound like you've got issues with the Support Conversations themselves? Is that because of the character development that goes out of the window (or more accurately, yo-yos between developed and undeveloped) in the support conversation?

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

For me, it comes to a matter of immersion. Do animals make noise? How about weapons clanging together? Are there environmental noises? If yes to all of the above, then I'm of the mind that humans need to make some kind of noise while speaking. This can vary from full voice acting (a la Three Houses), to partial voiced clips (a la Awakening), to voice-like sounds (a la Animal Crossing or Celeste), even to mere "dot-dot-dot" sounds (a la Pokemon Colosseum or Ace Attorney). Something to suggest that "this person is making noise as they speak". Completely noiseless dialogue is one of the most frustrating disconnects in presentation to me - I either have to imagine that a noise was made (and the game is too lazy to represent it), or that this is a world where people communicate silently. It shatters the immersion to me. Although, I recognize this impression is hardly universal.

Real reason: full voice acting in 3H lets me listen to supports while washing dishes or folding clothes, and it saves me from having to read anything. So in true Leonie fashion, I'm trying to get things done as efficiently as possible. That said, the expressiveness of the models... could use some serious work, I grant.

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

There´s voice-acting in Fire Emblem?

Voice acting sucks, since by the time the esteemed speaker has finished their sentence, I´ve already smashed the forward button and they start the next interval of text because hey, people read faster than a VA could speak. It´s a nuisance when they start the next sentence like they just got slapped and told to skip to the next line. Worse even, if you can´t get out of the damn cutscene or choice or whatever without the game forcing you to listen to interval Text XYZ until they are done speaking what you have already read, and the only other option is to skip the entire cutscene.

 

 

What´s this immersion that people talk about anyway? Like, do you all play the game and -zap- you are standing on Gronder Fields and swing your sword? Or some kinda Napoleon-esque commandeering?

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

On 6/7/2022 at 8:05 AM, Imuabicus said:

What´s this immersion that people talk about anyway? Like, do you all play the game and -zap- you are standing on Gronder Fields and swing your sword? Or some kinda Napoleon-esque commandeering?

I'd say it's moreso immersion into the characters. Giving characters a voice often makes them feel so much more "real" to me, and adds another dimension to their presentation. That's not to say that strong personalities can't exist in inaudible media - far from it. Literature, comics, and unvoiced games have solid narratives all the time. But I'd be lying if I said that characters like Seteth, Hubert, and Annette would've left anywhere near the same impression upon me, had they not been voiced. Tone, inflection, and timing can say much more than words alone. Good voice work can breathe a tremendous amount of life into a cast of characters.

[Jotari]

5 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

I'd say it's moreso immersion into the characters. Giving characters a voice often makes them feel so much more "real" to me, and adds another dimension to their presentation. That's not to say that strong personalities can't exist in inaudible media - far from it. Literature, comics, and unvoiced games have solid narratives all the time. But I'd be lying if I said that characters like Seteth, Hubert, and Annette would've left anywhere near the same impression upon me, had they not been voiced. Tone, inflection, and timing can say much more than words alone. Good voice work can breathe a tremendous amount of life into a cast of characters.

Seems relevant to reassert that Rhea's overall feel as a character would be immensely different without the (rather great) voice acting.