Voice acting should not be a requirement.

I've posted a total 7 topics. I guess I'm GAF weaksauce. :( It's ok my endless barrage of stupidity makes up for that!

EDIT: Once again DarthWufei humbles me, touché.
 
TekunoRobby said:
I've posted a total 7 topics. I guess I'm GAF weaksauce. :( It's ok my endless barrage of stupidity makes up for that!
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Hush it, I've only created two and one of them didn't get a single damn reply. Take that!
 
Mega Man's Electric Sheep said:
My problem with voice acting in games is that I read faster than I listen. Meaning, the people talk way too slow for me, and if there's text to go along with the voices, I end up skipping the voices anyhow. I can't see how anyone who has played the great RPG's of the last 15 years could think that voice acting is required. And until video game voice acting reaches the quality level of animated features, I don't mind reading text.

I think a bigger problem in RPG's is superflous and rambling exchanges. I'm looking at you, KOTOR, with your dialog trees with NPC's that go on and on. Kotor had voice acting, but as I said above, it was easier to just press the button to skip it.
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Bam, you hit the nail square on the head. I skipped practically every non-major dialog sequence in KotOR and read through it, and skipped most of the voice acting of the major scenes too.

Unless a game focuses on a cinematic style of storytelling (MGS anyone?), or something similar (the narration of Kain's deeds as you act them out in Blood Omen), voice acting is anything but necessary. It is an interesting tool that should be used when it suits the game, but please don't go around claiming that every game needs voice acting to be any good nowadays. Even if the general quality of VA was much higher than it currently is in the industry, I'd still largely find it superfluous like it was in KotOR.
 
while the score is good... it is kind of lame to dock a game based on a lack of voice acting, like saying a foreign film is bad because you cant stand subtitles...its just silly.
 
Voice acting really ruins many games for me. I turned off Tales of Symphonia after just watching the classroom scene in the beginning. I'll finish it later with VA turned off. However I think I still can't turn it off in cut scenes….

I really, really hope the next Zelda doesn't have voice acting. And if it does then link better not say anything. Keep it for a narrator maybe. Hell even for narration I'd prefer a nice font. I'm playing a game after all, taking the effort to read is a bit more immersive than listening to a horrible actor murder the atmosphere.

I did like the VA in FFX though but even in that case it was overdone and it felt more like a movie than FFIX did for example.
 
games should only have voice acting if they have A list caliber professional voice actors, and not some random person including, but not limited to: some idiot they got from a temp agency, random people off the street, the game developers, and jenny from marketing

because, at *least* 90% of games with voice acting, it's horrible
 
You're comparing a largely ancient, static medium which relies almost soley on imagination and comprehension for entertainment and knowledge versus one that leans on imagination but has always relied heavily on progressive, diverse visual and aural stimulation.
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I think the point is that, insofar as video game or entertainment software is a medium, it's a very versatile one in terms of format. Video games can resemble traditional games, movies, novels, table-talk RPGs... and lots more. Surely this versatility is a defining characteristic of the medium, and I don't see why anyone would want to limit it by, for instance, implying either that movie-like games (with a focus on graphics, sound and story) should not exist or that all games should have movie-like elements.

Going to expand on this later.
 
It depends on the game, really. Voice acting greatly enhanced the atmosphere of Beyond Good & Evil. Can you imagine playing the game without hearing Pey'j's drawl? The voices played a large part in bringing the characters to life.

For games like Zelda and the Mario RPGs, I just don't think voices would fit. Maybe it's because we've experienced the dialogue in these worlds through text before, but there's just something charming about reading the text in these games. Perhaps I could put my finger on it if it wasn't past 3 AM here.

Next question: Which conveys emotion more effectively, the sprites in Final Fantasy III or the models in Final Fantasy X?
 
Bizarro Sun Yat-sen said:
I think the point is that, insofar as video game or entertainment software is a medium, it's a very versatile one in terms of format. Video games can resemble traditional games, movies, novels, table-talk RPGs... and lots more. Surely this versatility is a defining characteristic of the medium, and I don't see why anyone would want to limit it by, for instance, implying either that movie-like games (with a focus on graphics, sound and story) should not exist or that all games should have movie-like elements.

Going to expand on this later.
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Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying. I was criticizing Oli's analogy.

Olimario said:
It's like docking points against a book because it doesn't have a tape to go along with it.
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Voice acting can be a double edged sword. It can either enhance the experience or ruin it.

Voice acting in it self isn’t really a requirement… It depends more on the kind of experience you want to deliver. I have yet to see a need for vice acting in any of Nintendo’s games. They all have dorky character which would get dorky and unserious vices which would lead to requests of their removal.

In KOTOR the voice acting gave a great enchantment to the experience mainly due to its serious and emotional nature while in MegaMan they pretty much ruin it. But KOTOR wouldn’t have been less enjoyable without the voices while MegaMan X7 would have been less annoying without them.
 
Chrono said:
Voice acting really ruins many games for me. I turned off Tales of Symphonia after just watching the classroom scene in the beginning. I'll finish it later with VA turned off. However I think I still can't turn it off in cut scenes….
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symphonia has no voice acting if you turn it off. i turned it off on replay to speed things up.

impirius said:
Next question: Which conveys emotion more effectively, the sprites in Final Fantasy III or the models in Final Fantasy X?
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i have a feeling you have an answer you want for this question...

just about the only emotion FFVI's sprites caused in me is annoyance. i would use that game's hopping/bopping sprites as excellent justification for the cinematic turn that FF took after that. the developers were clearly chomping at the bit to inject personality and visual excitement into the storytelling and they picked an absolutely abysmal method for FFVI. FFIV with its brief comedy sequences for the sprites worked infinitely better. plenty of contemporary games that just used sprites normally and told a story entirely through text dialogue did a vastly superior to FFVI, imo. (lufia II, for example.)

one of my big problems with FFVI. but i'm not a fan of that game.
 
I can imagine Paper Mario 2 getting on my nerves if it had a lot of voice acting, mainly because of Mario's voice.
 
I think voice acting (and cinema scenes) have a place in some games, but I really hate it when developers refuse to allow you to skip through them. Give me subtitles and voice acting, and let me decide if I want to spend the time listening to the voices.

I will say that I do enjoy "background" voice acting more so than voice acted scenes or skits. Hearing a character shout in the background as I battle is interesting and adds to the game... spending 2 minutes listening to a dull diatribe adds nothing.
 
I think it's also a bow to style.

Can you name me one Mario game that was fully voice acted? Hell... the only Mario project that ever added voices to the characters (completely) was the fucking cartoon show...

Saying that Paper Mario 2 is lacking because there is a lack of voice acting is like saying the Yankee's Uniforms are lacking because it doesn't have enough color. Pointless.

It was hard for me to get adjusted to the FF series moving to voice acting. I remember that many of us felt that perhaps it was not the best thing to do (after-all, it *IS* and RPG and you *ARE* supposed to be taking the role of the main character that you play). This is a minor detail... but wasn't FFX the first FF that you could not change the names of any of the characters in the series? I'm not bitching, the voice acting in FF was great, but it certainly was a change in style from the way the original FFs were set up.

Which brings me back to my point... Mario has been, historically, a tradtional series. The characters are the same... the color scheme is the same... the feel is the same. YOU EXPECTED PAPER MARIO TO HAVE VOICE ACTING?! ...no... I expect MGS3 to have Voice Acting.... never a Mario game... nor a Zelda game for that matter.

They'll never give Link a real voice... ever. And thank God... because that would be more of a travesty than making WW a cell shaded game (and I liked the cell shaded style).

My two cents.
 
If there was voice acting in paper Mario 2 I would definitely not buy it!

-1 to ign for wanting koopa, toad and Mario to be fully voice acted!!!


Nintendo should sign up some big Hollywood stars for the next Mario game

Toad - Ice Cube
Koopa - Snoop dog
Mario – Patrick Swayze
Bowser – David Hasselhoff (for the German audience)

Nintendo would be teh mature with gangsters doing the voice acting respek!
 
I remember when at the beginning of the Ps1/Saturn/N64 era you guys were all saying that voice acting is shit and that you don't want you games to talk. Gamers change... or maybe you're told what to like after all.

Voice acting is good ONLY if done right. 80% of the games outhere even today don't have good voice acting. It maybe better to have good voice acting against no voice acting but it's also better no voice acting against bad or average voice acting.
 
Whats wrong with average voice acting? Maybe God should strike us all mute because we have average voices. We could all walk around with giant dry erase boards and a marker and write down what we say, and then we can hold little sqiggly lines in a thought bubble above our head that shows that we are pissed off or confused.

Nothing wrong with average voice acting. Its not annoying nor is it amazing, but its good enough to the point where i can sitback and relax without having to read. Why do you want to read when you play a game. It sucks. You should be concentrating on whats going on with the characters and not the text at the bottom of the screen. This isnt the SNES days where we have emotionless and boring sprites for characters. We have real looking characters with vibrant 3d graphics. I want to concentrate on their facial expressions, actions and the world around them the artists created...not read the text on the bottom of the screen. Could you imagine going to a movie and nobody talked but they handed you a script you had to read along with. That sounds like alot of fun. No it doesnt

You'll always have your gaming games where voice acting really isnt necessary. Like a fighting game or a straight up shooter. But if you're going to take the effort to present your game in a cinematic hollywood type of style that tells a story, for the love of god use voice acting too.

What would Conker have been like without voice acting. Not as funny I can tell you. Its one thing to read these funny lines, but to actually here the cartoony animal creatures say them make it alot better. Could you imagine the great mighty poo song without him actually singing it. It wouldnt have been as good.
 
The necessity of voice acting depends heavily on the type of type of game, I'd say. If it's done exceptionally well, then it's nearly always a plus, but sometimes even average voice acting can be a detriment to a game. Take FFX for example. The voice acting wasn't particularly bad, but it surely wasn't flawless. This killed the immersion for me. For that game I wuold've much preferred text.

In games where intensity is an issue, ie: First Person Shooters and stealth games, voice acting is pretty much a must. It completely interrupts the flow to have to stop and read what someone is actually saying to you.
 
Whats wrong with average voice acting? Maybe God should strike us all mute because we have average voices. We could all walk around with giant dry erase boards and a marker and write down what we say, and then we can hold little sqiggly lines in a thought bubble above our head that shows that we are pissed off or confused.
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Ugly people don’t model
Bad actors don’t star in good movies (not to often)
People with bad voices don’t work on the radio or voice act

There is nothing wrong with having a bad voice, but if you’re paying a decent sum of money for a game you don’t want average voice acting you want the best possible voice acting, quality voice acting can make games so much more realistic or tell a story in a more interesting way.

Why waste your hard earned cash on mediocrity.

The bottom line is there is plenty of quality voice acting talent out there that’s wasted!
 
For me, even so-so voice acting is better than no voice acting. Of course, when the dialog is too long and boring, I just skip it altogether, so it doesn't matter. But with good dialog, voice acting adds so much. I can only imagine how Vagrant Story's cut-scenes would've been with voice acting added.

Hell, even bad voice acting can be a good thing in a hilarious kind of way in a cheesy game (House of the Dead, Zombie Revenge, etc.).
 
Miburou said:
I can only imagine how Vagrant Story's cut-scenes would've been with voice acting added.
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Ick. For me, Vagrant Story is a good example of a game that didn't need voice acting at all because of the way it was presented. It was a stylistic choice, and it worked perfectly. Besides, do you think there's any way Square would have bothered (in 1999-2000, no less) to hire an English voice cast skilled enough to do that game's script justice? I can only imagine them tripping over it and making a mockery. :p VS did have voice acting, but it was used sparingly (to accentuate ingame action) and done well enough that I have no complaints about it.
Ugly people don’t model
Bad actors don’t star in good movies (not to often)
People with bad voices don’t work on the radio or voice act
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I agree here. I've said this here before (to no effect), but I think that if developers don't have the skills or resources to produce high-quality cinematics (with a decent script and, when appropriate, proper voice acting), then they shouldn't be trying to use cinematic storytelling at all. They should devote their resources to strengthening other parts of the game and using other, less budget-intensive means of storytelling, rather than producing tripe that most people would rather mash the start button than sit through.
 
99% of voice acting sucks so who the hell cares?

i dont understand why you people even care about these reviews. No offense to our reviewer friends in this thread, but most of them know as much about games as we do. The only difference being they get paid and we dont.

These magazines\websites arent and shouldnt be looked at as if they were real intellectual examinations of game design. They are just consumer buying guides. People read the reviews, and if the complaints of the "reviewer" identify with things the reader doesnt like, who the hell cares? OMG one less person buys paper mario! The world will fall apart. I'm not saying these guys suck and this style of review should be destroyed forever. There is a market for this style of review, and of course not everyone is concerned with the theory behind the design of astro boy or the social issues dealt with in relation to the freedom of movement in GTA. The job of these guys is to tell you "this game is fun" or "this game is not fun." Some people might think GTA is the most fun game ever and give it a 100.10% and some people might think GTA is boring and give it a 52.39%. It doesnt really matter because each users idea of "fun" is different, and fun isnt something that you can guarantee.

The industry(in the west anyway, i dunno what they do in the east) is in serious need of an intellectual base that can analyze games as the art they are, not on whatever fanboy quotient it fills, or how much bloom lighting it uses. There are some really fascinating films out there that dont make you feel any emotion and are flat out "boring" to watch, there are games like this as well.

My point is this, I'm sure you all know by now that these "reviews" are opinion. One opinion will never be agreed to by everyone. So why even worry about it? Its more interesting to hear what makes the game compelling, when its not "omg the game is pretty and i love jumping on heads." Give us something real to chew on, we're hungry for it.
 
I don't know it's been mentioned but why can't games like this (with lots of text/storyline) have voice acting with the option of turning it off? Surely that's got to be the best of both worlds. I'd prefer voice acting these days as I hate reading text of a TV screen. If the voice acting is bad I can just turn it off.
 
AeroGod said:
Whats wrong with average voice acting? Maybe God should strike us all mute because we have average voices. We could all walk around with giant dry erase boards and a marker and write down what we say, and then we can hold little sqiggly lines in a thought bubble above our head that shows that we are pissed off or confused.

Nothing wrong with average voice acting. Its not annoying nor is it amazing, but its good enough to the point where i can sitback and relax without having to read. Why do you want to read when you play a game. It sucks. You should be concentrating on whats going on with the characters and not the text at the bottom of the screen. This isnt the SNES days where we have emotionless and boring sprites for characters. We have real looking characters with vibrant 3d graphics. I want to concentrate on their facial expressions, actions and the world around them the artists created...not read the text on the bottom of the screen. Could you imagine going to a movie and nobody talked but they handed you a script you had to read along with. That sounds like alot of fun. No it doesnt
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Funny, I don't recall being bored while playing Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy III(US names used). And i shudder to think how something like "You spoony Bard!" from FFII would have sounded with a voice actor. Personally, I don't want my videogame constantly yapping at me, at least not something like an RPG. I get my immersion from the storyline and the music...in fact, I'd prefer reading something with some great BGM, rather than the BGM being distracted and/or overpowered by the voice acting on top of it. VA is limiting in some ways...you're forced with only one interpretation...one voice, one pitch, one reading.

VA has its place...something like GTAIII is a good example. But come the eff on...Paper Mario? MARIO? He doesn't need anything more than his "ya!" "hoo" "yahoo!" "It's a-me",etc. Why dock a game for something so non-essential, especially when if it were implemented, they'd probably bitch just the same. "Nintendo's use of voice acting for a game such as this is really unneccesary and tacked-on."

Are we becoming so lazy that we don't want to read anything at all? Soon we won't want to use our hands(controllers), or be forced to look in one direction(towards the TV). "Push buttons? I don't want to have to work so hard when I just want to play a game"
 
Ugh... voice acting ends up harming some games a lot more than others... it's fine if the voice acting is in short, few word clips, but to go through some of these RPGs lately... makes me turn the VA off... Most RPG convos don't really work well when they're spoken :P
 
olimario said:
have the in game voice acting as an afterthought.
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I wouldn't want this at all. If a company can't afford or doesn't spend the effort obtaining good voice actors, they shouldn't even bother.

Unless it ends up being so bad that it turns into unintentional comedy... :)
 
VA is a must in games that rely heavily on story. I would not have enjoyed MGS, MGS2, Fable, Crimson Skies, KOTOR, GRIMFANDANGO as much as i did if it were text base.

It adds a lot, especially in terms of emotion. Funny, sad, angry, its easier to believe, which makes the inital experience more satisfying.

Its just as important as great music for me.
 
This is just like how some people prefer subtitled anime as opposed to crappy dubs. I'd say most people would probably prefer voice acting if it's good, but I think everyone knows how craptacular it would be in a Nintendo mascot game. Not even worth the option of listening to it IMO. Super Mario Sunshine cited as evidence. Sega's Sonic Adventure/Heros series if you need more. These mascots are not like the Jak series, which is actually voice acted as a typical cartoon.

I remember my sister laughing at the sound that was coming out of the talking star's mouth in the original Paper Mario because of how cute it was. I shudder to even think if that sound was actually forming words.

And sure, I'm sure some would say that they would at least like the option of voice acting, and just turn it off it it gets that bad. But really, did one word coming out of Bowser's mouth actually add to the experience in Mario Sunshine? For most games I'd want it, but for the family friendly Nintendo titles and other similar games, I'd just wonder why the developers wasted their time.
 
Future said:
This is just like how some people prefer subtitled anime as opposed to crappy dubs. I'd say most people would probably prefer voice acting if it's good, but I think everyone knows how craptacular it would be in a Nintendo mascot game. Not even worth the option of listening to it IMO. Super Mario Sunshine cited as evidence. Sega's Sonic Adventure/Heros series if you need more. These mascots are not like the Jak series, which is actually voice acted as a typical cartoon.

I remember my sister laughing at the sound that was coming out of the talking star's mouth in the original Paper Mario because of how cute it was. I shudder to even think if that sound was actually forming words.

And sure, I'm sure some would say that they would at least like the option of voice acting, and just turn it off it it gets that bad. But really, did one word coming out of Bowser's mouth actually add to the experience in Mario Sunshine? For most games I'd want it, but for the family friendly Nintendo titles and other similar games, I'd just wonder why the developers wasted their time.
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You're right on Junior
 
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