Voice

[Shaibana]

ya thats wy i say: itll be a little hard for FF :P

but i wouldnt mind Japanese voices at all ^^

[Jessweeee♪]

Half assing is more insulting to me. I would rather have the Japanese audio with English subs than that.

I feel like less effort is put into subtitles than anything, even when done professionally at times. "It smells like urine" can mean something like "you are so immature." How is a western audience going to get that? JRPGs can get weird enough without the half-assed idiom translations. When it's voiced out loud someone's more likely to say "wait a second this sounds extremely retarded."

[Eaglegun]

I want to be able to choose what the character says. Like choosing to almost kiss Don Corneo in FF7.

You could choose a lot less when voice acting came in. So I'm pro Text Boxes.

I agree that text is better for RPGs because of the possibility for branching dialogue. I guess you could do that with voice acting, but it would be more difficult. Branching dialogue(even the limited kind) makes the player feel more involved in the story, which should be a point in "role playing" games.

[Vyk]

I agree that some lines should just not be spoken. I have no real preference as long as it's done well. The issue with the actions or emotes in text could easily be remedied with sound bytes akin to Kefka's laugh, or the Moogle or Chocobo sounds from FFIX. Or a more terrible but also relevant example would be baby Mario or the baby penguins from Mario 64

Another great alternative would be character portraits in dialog that have multiples to convey different emotions. It worked great in Lunar, and to an extent in Xenogears. You wouldn't have to type out *sob* if the portrait next to the text is bawling its eyes out

Also that strange pause and lack of context issue in spoken dialog has been around forever and I think its long past time to put it to rest. What the hell are the localization teams thinking not giving actors context? Why in the world would you just tell someone "here, say this line". There has to be a director behind that. Why wouldn't they tell the actor what's being said before and after this line, and what emotion they should be trying to inflect in their voice. They're not psychic, they're not going to know what connotation to use. And I think they could do a better job with the timing in general. I know Working Designs demonstrated in a lot of Making Of videos they released in their final few games what a painstaking process they went through trying to make everything sound just right, and they weren't afraid to do thirty takes on a single line just to get the timing and emotion just right, to the director's approval. Granted processes that extensive may have contributed to their overall financial issues and stuff, but its not like other companies can't at least try half that hard

The writing's always been bad and I think there's always room for improvement. But in this regard I think it falls more in the lap of the voice acting director. And I would much rather text if they're not going to put much effort into doing voices

[Wolf Kanno]

Since this is more about voice work in general, I moving it to General FF.

I prefer text myself. I've seen some great VA work in games but they are rare, and SE certainly doesn't do it often. X's VA work wasn't so bad considering their earlier track record but some of the VA's bombed it, specifically Yuna's who tries too hard to emulate the Japanese performance which doesn't work so well in English, and Seymour's performance was also a little too campy for my taste. XII had a pretty good VA cast imo though I still kept subtitles on anyway so I could understand some of the characters who have really thick accents. XIII's VA work is actually pretty good, its just the writing is awful and no performer could have sold it as serious drama.

Dissidia has some awful VA work but I blame it more on the fact that none of the games had voices before and yet fans have had years to form their own idea of how they sound. I'll tell you now that a majority of the formally un-voiced characters didn't sound like I had imagined in Dissidia, I still can't get around Terra, Kuja, Kefka, and Zidanes VA work. The really bad thing is that I don't like the Japanese versions any better, so switching it to another language wouldn't work for me either.

Other examples of bad VA choices is Cid Highwind, I wish I could punch the lights out of the guy who thought it would be neat to give him an American Southern Hick accent. It really destroyed the character for me and the idea of a remake with that voice is enough for me to pass. Hell most of VII's VA are not so great beyond the leads. Even FFIV has some awful VA work with Tellah, Cid, and a few others imho.

This is partially why I don't mind text, I actually like creating my own idea for the characters voices and often time, its easier to stomach cheesy dialogue when you're reading as opposed to listening to it. I've yet to play a Squaresoft/Squenix title that was improved because of voice overs, I'd rather they just drop them entirely if they are not going to use it properly.

[DMKA]

Voice acting of course.

[magemasher]

I think it works both ways. On the older consoles pre ffx then I prefer text bubbles.

Now we have these great graphics it would be weird having text bubbles instead of voice acting.

[Mercen-X]

Depends


If the game has full-motion or cutscenes, I want them voiced. But then I want the whole thing voiced, not just those parts. That's one thing I hate about Kingdom Hearts.
It's one way or the other! Not both! Drop it!
Cutscenes can be dialogued with text rather than voice-acting, but if you need to control the flow of the text so you don't miss anything, then the cutscene will be considerably slower.
Personally, I prefer voice-acting. It adds another element of immersion to the game. If I'm staring at a bunch of people who are gesturing or making faces and no sounds are coming out, I react the same way I do if there's no music or sound FX. If I wanted to play a text-based game, I'd pick up a text-based game.
I have mixed feelings about the voice of the main character. On the one hand, I don't want my character wandering around as a mute that other characters somehow understand. On the other hand, that's not my voice! There's no win, because the level of immersion taken from the main character is the same whether he has a voice or not.