Did the "Non-Specific" lines anyoy anyone else?

[MJN SEIFER]

I like FFVI, it's one of my top FF games, and I get that the reason this happened is because there is no "forced" main character (like in FFVII for example you are "forced" to select Cloud most of the time), so there is no particular character saying it.

But it just looked wrong for me. I get that sometimes it's simple things like "Let's go to [town's name]!" or whatever, but other times it is specific. For example on the Phantom Train, it's obviously Sabin talking (there's no "thou" type speech for Cyan, and Shadow isn't necessarily there (and the lines don't suit him), but the name is still left off. Another example is when Ramuh tells the story of Espers and a random character says a line like "[somebody] told me about this when I was a kid" it's still a samey line, but if you study the different variations of this line (mostly by whoever it was that told them the story) you can guess which character it was that spoke, this is more obvious in the Japanese translation.

Finally, other FFs always took steps to do optional lines for characters - I dunno how it works, but it's obvious that there is some kind of code in the prgraming that checks, whether a character is there or not before playing his/her lines; again using FFVII as an example, the game reaches, say the Temple of Ancients - Cloud and Aeris are always present so the game automatically includes their lines, but the 3rd character is optional. Say you choose Cid, and it's time for the 3rd character to speak, the game obviously has a check like "Is Cid there? Yes/No" and if it's Yes, the game loads his lines, and cancels anyother lines.

[Roogle]

Throwaway lines like this are one of the primary reasons that I do not like games with party limitations.

Final Fantasy VI is one of the earliest introductions of this style of writing that allows a player to customize his party without affecting the outcome of the story. I think that it works for most people, but it causes me to lose interest in the storyline pretty quickly once a game starts throwing these types of lines out.

[Roto13]

I really don't like those generic lines. They don't work with characters like Gau and Umaro and Cyan who have very unique ways of speaking.

[blackmage_nuke]

It was a bit of annoying but it didnt ruin it for me entirely since some of the time when you take someone to a scene you get an extra line of dialouge like bringing Cyan to the feast with the empire.

[Wolf Kanno]

I honestly never noticed or if one of the lines did appear it usually fit with the party present. So you need to be more specific cause I really never noticed or obviously felt it was terribly important.

[MJN SEIFER]

EDIT: Quoting it butchered the layout horribly so here's a link instead. Go to the part we're they're all saying "[somebody] told me about Espers living in our world" (usually it's a parent or a family member, but the onese who don't mention a family member are the specific characters).

[Wolf Kanno]

The problem here is that its not completely non-specific. Locke has a line designated to him which makes sense cause he's the only character at this point who has to be in your party. You only get a non-specific line if your lead character is anyone but Locke and Gau. I hardly call that reason to be alarmed or disturbed.

Other lines that appear later that are non-specific are so short, I can't imagine trying to create half a dozen variations for it. Like when they get to Ramuh transforming into Magicite, and the party line is simply, "What do you mean?" I can't imagine trying to make that any more character specific lines cause it would be lost in the translation. You see this down a little ways with one line after Ramuh's death where Cyan and Celes get their own lines similar to the generic one but the reasoning is completely lost in translation cause there are no words to give a feminine voice and no true english equivalent of Cyan's speech pattern, so no matter how you translate it in English it comes out almost the same way.

[Jiro]

It didn't really bother me. I would've liked a whole bunch of specific lines but it didn't detract.