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

[Aulayna]

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.

I appreciate that. What I was trying to suggest is that if voice acting supposedly reduces the uniqueness of the experience then surely more people would come to a similar conclusion about the character? Yet there's just as many views and thoughts of Tidus as a character compared to other major characters pre-voice acting so perhaps this isn't the case.

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."

You're right on this one, I misinterpretted your use of the asterix as trying to support the point you were trying to make at that point in time rather than just presenting auxillary information.

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.

Not really no. Voice acting was not the problem with Mass Effect 3 - the problem was that for the sake of culmination they had to annex some of the sub-narratives in a way that was rather abrupt or seemingly forced. This would've been the case regardless of whether or not it was voice acted due to the conclusion they were trying to build too at the end of the game. That's an issue with the design of the game, not the voice acting. Voice acting played very little in that - the reason why I brought it up was as a counter to you saying that voice acting reduces the players capacity to be able to "own" their characters.

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.

This is fair enough. But likewise graphical advancements take away the room left for imagination - is that diminishing your experience too?

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.

On the topic of voice acting being bad. Yes there is obviously room for creative vision but at the same time bad voice acting is just as clear as bad acting. Now the developers may have a vision behind it that gets lost in translation but for the most part the topic of bad voice acting is covered in the articles you linked. Actors are given no time to prepare and are expected to turn up and deliver on the day with very little time to prepare meaning that the tones and accentuations of the voice may be completely off key for certain lines becaue they haven't had time to prepare for it. This really detracts from the whole exerpience and it creates a sense of awkwardness - just like bad acting in a film results in the loss of the suspension of disbelief which disengages the audience.

Now you are right that this is a Final Fantasy forum but the very nature of the Final Fantasy series is it's always been one that has had some base elements but always tried to refine, define and then redefine itself. From the shift from 2d to pre-rendered backdrops and low-res polygonal models all the way up to the stylized realism of XIII. Voice acting coming into this is something I've always seen as par for the course with a series as iterative as FF. Outside of XIII though we're never really stuck with the same set of characters for an extended period of time. Advent Children was the first exception to this and whilst the VA may have taken away from our memories of the characters I think the real issue was more the sheer amount the film as a whole stripped away from the characters for the sake of commercial exploitation.

However, just because this is an FF forum doesn't mean we can't look beyond that scope at other games where this topic is having quite notable impacts:

The Metroid franchise for example. This is a prime case in favour of your argument. Samus Aran the silent heroine who was always the lone wolf in the galaxy for nearly every instalment. Then along comes Metroid: Other M - she gets voice acting and suddenly interactions with a whole host of NPC characters completely turning the character fans know and love on it's head in an attempt to become more "personal" but at the same time completely alienating her from some fans in the process.

Likewise Nintendo's decision to specifically not have voice acting in The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword despite the Wii being more than capable of doing it because they were worried it wouldn't meet fans expectations or pre-conceived notions.

So I do get what your saying, honestly, like say for example if they remade FFVI with voice acting and Celes sounded like Vanille I'd be pretty outraged about it too. But when it comes to FF games each instalment is essentially it's own self-contained bubble so it's certainly a lot more difficult to go in with a set of expectations about the matter compared to Metroid for example. Developers do seem to be making leaps and bounds these days to make sure the voice acting carries a lot more credence than before.

All I'm really trying to highlight is the contrary, that there are cases where voice acting has worked in a games favour. I appreciate that for you voice acting diminishes your ability to put your own imagination into the character but for me - personally - when voice acting is done well and adds to the successful emotional delivery of the narrative it's a trade-off I'm willing to make and it doesn't come as quite as much of a detriment to the experience for me. But at the end of the day this is all just personal preference and this article is about why you don't enjoy voice acted RPGs so I digress.