Persona 4 Golden, a rant

[Vyk]

Yeah, I just started interacting with Marie, and her lines are fairly... I dunno. You can kinda tell she's shoehorned into the story, and not written with quite the adeptness they had back in the day with the game's creation. It's not bad, it just seems a bit more amateurish. She starts off really thorny and abrasive, and immediately does a 180 when you start interacting with her without any build-up or proper progression. And then still has sprinklings of stand-off'ishness. Kinda inconsistent. And her voice isn't all that great. But she'll probably grow on me. I'm considering pursuing her romantically since that's one of the additions, I figure I may as well see something new with this version of the game since Chie is ruined for me. So she's not a total turn-off. I just think she could have been written a tad better

I see a lot of people saying the new voice is "more" Chie. Like the old voice didn't represent her character properly. So I think we can agree that the different voices create effectively different characters. Until I get used to this voice representing her, my feeling is not just a voice change. Its like her whole personality changed, from my perspective. The pitch, the inflections, the emphases, the delivery, all make a huge difference. And apparently the Chie liked wasn't the real Chie, but I still like her more

I'm at the point where her voice is starting to calm down, after events in the game affect her directly. People online said her voice became more tolerable after that, and they're pretty much right. On top of that, I'm starting to get used to it anyway. I'll probably never get so used to her that I prefer her, but I'm not going to let it ruin a great game for me. At least now I can appreciate her as a character more

Also, thanks for the understanding, Flynn. I guess there are always tropes if you look hard enough. But the characters in this game are some of the best fleshed out in any Japanese medium, since the whole point of most of the game is to explore people's personality on a deeply personal and psychological level. Even their darkest, most immature and selfish parts of their personalities are put on display for the player. And the reactions to it are very human. So maybe that helps overlook the tropes, since they're not treated nearly in a typical manner

[Ergroilnin]

Marie seems like your everyday tsundere to me to be honest.

[Vyk]

Typical as her trope may be I think it could have been done a tad bit better. I guess I hold them to high standards. But she's not a turn off or anything. Part of the problem may be that I don't have lot of exposure to tsundare archetypes that I'm aware of

[Jessweeee♪]

I enjoyed the Marie story but I always felt like it would have felt weird if you played Golden before the original. Like her story is just there. Idk about "shoehorned" but very disconnected even if they did loosely tie her in at the end. It's good bonus content for people who were already fans but going through Golden first she'd seem like a hugely important character and I would imagine some people expected a bigger impact.

[Bright Shield]

I feel that old Chie's voice sounded better. The new Chie is a better actress, and fits the character more though.

Something I loved about this game was that the characters were characters, and not so much the typical anime and JRPG tropes you always see. I mean sure, they probably still fit some archetypes, but not the typical over used and annoying ones. They were realistic and relatable

As much as I love P4, I gotta disagree with you on the bolded part. The female cast in particular were very much typical anime tropes. They can all be found in many harem anime.

He mentioned reducing characters to tropes. Yes, the P4 characters may utilize some tropes, but there's a difference between a character being just a trope or cliché, and a character being an actual character/person beyond that. The characters in the games, due to their nature (getting to deeply know them in the passing school year), are never shallow tropes, and there's always many layers and nuances to them.

Maybe, but the same can be said of most JRPG casts. The P4 cast certainly isn't special in this regard. They are just as trope-ish as your average JRPG cast. The difference is that most JRPGs take tropes from western fantasy titles, and shonen fighter animes. While P4 goes for slice of life/harem anime tropes.

[Fynn]

Tropes Are Not Bad

[Bright Shield]

Tropes Are Not Bad

When did I say tropes were bad?

[Yellow_Magic]

Yeah, I just started interacting with Marie, and her lines are fairly... I dunno. You can kinda tell she's shoehorned into the story, and not written with quite the adeptness they had back in the day with the game's creation. It's not bad, it just seems a bit more amateurish. She starts off really thorny and abrasive, and immediately does a 180 when you start interacting with her without any build-up or proper progression. And then still has sprinklings of stand-off'ishness. Kinda inconsistent. And her voice isn't all that great. But she'll probably grow on me. I'm considering pursuing her romantically since that's one of the additions, I figure I may as well see something new with this version of the game since Chie is ruined for me. So she's not a total turn-off. I just think she could have been written a tad better

That's interesting...Marie's just been introduced in Ultimax, and after talking for a bit about...stuff, she suddenly went all tsundere on Yu, which was kinda confusing. I'm getting the impression that she wasn't really a smooth addition into the P4 Universe at any rate.

I see a lot of people saying the new voice is "more" Chie. Like the old voice didn't represent her character properly. So I think we can agree that the different voices create effectively different characters. Until I get used to this voice representing her, my feeling is not just a voice change. Its like her whole personality changed, from my perspective. The pitch, the inflections, the emphases, the delivery, all make a huge difference. And apparently the Chie liked wasn't the real Chie, but I still like her more

Yeah, Neo-Chie is just really squealy and less action-y to me.

[Fynn]

Tropes Are Not Bad

When did I say tropes were bad?

I never said you said they were bad Just throwing it out there to aid our discussion.

[Vyk]

I think it may be partly my fault, as I insinuated that tropes are bad by suggesting that these characters don't match what I considered "typical" tropes. Though I apparently misrepresented my argument. Tropes are a great foundation to build a character upon, and it's done really well in this game, and in the previous game as well. A lot of Japanese media use tropes as a crutch and don't expand on them, and then I guess they get a bit cliche and bland, and I get sick of seeing the same thing over and over with no variance or development upon anything established

That sorta thing always bugs me as a writer since I've taken courses on how to avoid that situation, and sadly I see it a lot in Japanese media. I was really just trying to praise the creators in this case for being a-typical and doing a good job building on the foundation of those tropes and developing the characters in realistic and relatable ways

But like I said, I may have given more praise than was due (though it's certainly due, regardless) because I don't have a lot of exposure to slice-of-life anime, or much harem anime (not anymore anyway, though I used to love their romantic comedies which are mostly harem animes)

Anyway, I'm glad a lot of constructive conversation came out of this topic. I mostly just wanted to bitch about Chie like a whine-o. The change seems to have set in stone now in the game, and everyone was right, so far now that I'm at that point in the game, her voice hasn't reverted much, and now that she's a battle companion, her shriekiness at least has better context than it did in normal everyday conversation. So it's a lot more tolerable

[Bright Shield]

I never said you said they were bad Just throwing it out there to aid our discussion.

I guess. For the record, I tend to love certain tropes.

I was just saying that the P4 cast is just as trope-ish as most JRPG casts. The difference is that it uses tropes which are rarely seen in JRPGs.

Not sure if I made it clear, but I'm not trying to put the P4 cast down either. I love those guys and gals. One of my favorite RPGs ever. I probably only prefer 1 game to it(my list changes a lot though, lol).

[Vyk]

I realized something last night with a Chie heavy week in the game. Her new recordings are not the same quality as everyone else. It's nothing but treble. Which is not helpful since her voice is nothing but treble. The recordings of the rest of the cast sounds much fuller. Even the higher sounding characters. I'd say there's not enough bass in the audio but I'm not sure everyone would understand what. I mean since there is no bass to her voice. But something is definitely missing. Which is weird because you'd think all these years later they'd have better equipment and policies for their audio

Not entirely sure if it's the mic or the mixing equipment or a lazy or inexperienced mixer. But even as a novice who is not an audiophile I am certain I could have made all her dialog sound as full of audio frequency as the rest of the cast just messing around in an adobe program over a weekend. I'm not sure how Atlus let it slide

I need another event to involve Teddie to see if I can hear that distinction in his recordings as well

[Ergroilnin]

Good thing I am close to deaf to anything even close to music and deeper tones so I totally do not hear that difference in the recordings.

[Vyk]

I use my stereo speakers (pseudo-surround sound) for most of my gaming. Now that I'm not raging over the voice change, I can pick up on other nuances. I think it's kinda unfair to the voice actress. There was something about her that seemed strangely out of place in comparison, now I know what it is. It's just weird, because it would have been an easy fix. Kinda wish I had an amp that I could force higher pitches to lower ends. But whatever. It was just an observation is all :3