The advantage of RPGs: Why voice acting has lessened my joy for them

[Dr. rydrum2112]

I may be wildly of base with how I interpreted this so bear with me...

So despite Tidus being voice acted there's still quite a wide disparity of opinion on what people thought of him as a protagonist and how people interpreted his narrative progression (from some arguing he's a spoilt selfish brat to others viewing him as a selfless help the helpless hero). Going by your argument that voice acting gives people a carbon copy character with little room for differentiation - this wouldn't be the case?

uhm- no. I said it takes a little piece away from the uniqueness of my experience. There is a section in my article showing how FFX is still constructivist & experiential, and that clearly has voice acting.

Also the majority of those articles you've linked too focus more on the overall quality of the voice acting and the institutional reasons why voice acting as a whole in video games isn't quite up to par yet.

Pretty sure I specifically say this, with "for other arguments as to why voice acting isn’t all it is cracked up to be."

Even so that level of interaction has limitations - if you are playing a scripted story with scripted characters you are essentially playing someone elses characters. Whilst you may have flexibility over the battle style inbetween at the end of the day the characters will behave as the script dictates - regardless of if VA'ed or not.

The same is true of Mass Effect, all voice acted - yet I still felt like my Shepard was MY Shepard and this was MY experience and she was built how I wanted to play and that differed from my friends Shepard. But again in ME3 which was culminating a the story it meant that some of the divergent paths had to be annexed - but that was more due to the game design, narrative as a whole than the voice acting.

Are you on both sides of the fence here? Seems like you agree with me in the second paragraph.

But again there's voice acted RPGs that have had divergent paths too - does the voice acting take away from that?

Voice acting takes away the ability for me to give the character the voice that I want to give them/think is appropriate.

Honestly I just don't feel that singling out the FF series is a good lens through which to look at this. The issue with VA in FF is more down to implementation and quality than it is with what it may or may not fundamentally detract from the experience. FF games as a whole still largely use the same character archtypes and if anything all VA has served to do is draw highlight to this but the base core is still there. I do agree that in video games as a whole VA can and does detract from the experience.

Well 1, this is a final fantasy forum so obviously I should use that as a reference/example. I guess you missed what I said again. My point was that everyone just says the voice acting is bad- how do you know the voice acting wasn't exactly as it was intended by the creators? The idea of just bad voice acting is confounded with the idea that our expectations of what the characters should sound like aren't met.