cj_iwakura
Member
Even if you don't like the dub, their lack of transparency should be alarming.
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Will BlazBlue Central Fiction receive a dub, or the GGXrd treatment?
- Thread starter cj_iwakura
- Start date
Even if you don't like the dub, their lack of transparency should be alarming.
ShadowSoldier89
Member
People like that really create a confrontational mentality for me. Like makes me wish more games would go the atlus route and not include the JP audio
cj_iwakura
Member
Like, ahoy matey, and some junk!
VanillaCakeIsBurning
Member
Yeah, that "fuck you, got mine" attitude that some people have makes them look really bad.
ThoughtsOfSpeaking
Banned
Id normally agree with you, but it's a fighting game. The main attraction is not story mode.
Long there is some English in the menus, I couldn't give a shit.
Main attraction for you might not be story mode, but don't think you speak for everyone. Glad you don't give a shit, but apparently some people do.
cj_iwakura
Member
https://twitter.com/CristinaVee/status/756717595500294144
She's clueless too.
BB's story mode encompasses nearly a hundred hours at this point. Clearly a lot of people do.
She's clueless too.
BB's story mode encompasses nearly a hundred hours at this point. Clearly a lot of people do.
skLaFarebear
Member
A lot of people love the Blazblue story mode and couldn't give less of a shit about the competitive side of it.
I'd say Blazblue is probably the only fighting game outside of NRS fighting games where you could argue the main story is the main attraction.
What, so the teeth gnashing in this thread and on other places on the Internet could increase by a couple orders of magnitude? Would you really be happy if they came out and said something like "Yeah, we dropped the English voice track for financial reasons. The cost of doing it kept going up and sales of the series keep going down, and it's gotten to the point where an English track is not viable (even after accounting for the lost sales from going with JP-only audio) so it got dropped."?
Yeah, it's kind of an assey thing to for the final release in this arc but at the same time that sort of sentimental thinking is how businesses implode.
(No, I don't know for certain that is why the voices were dropped but I think it's a fairly safe guess, given how every release tacks on more characters and tons more dialog and how most game series bleed sales over time.)
cj_iwakura
Member
Instead they'll just ignore everyone until the game is out? Great PR. At very least, the polite thing would be 'due to [bullshit excuse], CF will be JP audio only'.
I'm sure it is for financial reasons, but what are they doing by not saying anything now? Delaying the "teeth gnashing"? Creating terrible PR around the release date when reviews come in saying they dropped the dub?
Assuming they dropped the dub there is no good answer for them. I would prefer them to actually make a statement instead of releasing it like nothing happened.
cj_iwakura
Member
It's pretty obvious. They know if they confirm the US release won't have a dub, everyone will import it and hurt their sales. So in a sense, doing this will make sales even worse.
Such a shame. As much as it was incomprehensible anime nonsense, playing the Continuum Shift story dubbed to 100% completion was one of my fonder memories of fighting game single player. The dub quality has dropped significantly over the years since, but this is still enough to make me hesitate on pre ordering this.
I feel that how close the US release is to the JP release will have a larger impact on how many people decide to import than whether or not it has a dub will.
It's the reason I imported BBCP and the same way I'll decide if I'm importing BBCF. Anyone invested in the story will not have much of a reason to import unless they can read Japanese.
Makes me sad. Cristina Vee is Noel for me.
Word. Cristina Vee is the cutiest patootiest.
When it comes to Arc's fighters, for a lot of players, it is.
Agreed.
enixbelmont
Member
People don't understand that unlike many fighting games, Blazblue has character interactions mid battle you completely lose if you don't understand the language. Subs aren't really practical. It adds a lot, IMO. One of my favorite things Blazblue does.
Yeah seriously. The unique dialogue characters have in the middle of battle against each other is something I really like. No more "JIN! YOU BITCH!" after an Inferno Divider. So much is gonna be lost and battle dialogue just going to be noise now.
The Yo Tornado
Member
Yeah, the sheer amount of unique dialogue between characters during fights is great. That combined with the exclusive themes and intros for certain pairings make Blazblue one of the few games that can actually tell interesting stories during battles. A lot of that is going to be lost without the accompanying (stellar) voice work.
VanillaCakeIsBurning
Member
Blazblue has tons of character specific dialogue for most matchups.
That's one thing I loved about it since the beginning, like the story seeps its way into the actual matches, and they've done this better than any other fighting game I've played.
That all disappears when you can't understand what they're saying.
If there truly is no English dub I hope they get roasted for it because that's a really bad decision and something that should not be hidden until the game is released so people can potentially save their money.
That's one thing I loved about it since the beginning, like the story seeps its way into the actual matches, and they've done this better than any other fighting game I've played.
That all disappears when you can't understand what they're saying.
If there truly is no English dub I hope they get roasted for it because that's a really bad decision and something that should not be hidden until the game is released so people can potentially save their money.
Platinumstorm
Member
My main attraction to BB and GG is actually the story mode. I know that's ridiculous, but the BB story mode, in particular, has been both fantastic and hilarious.
I did my part and made a tweet.
Same here. I"m trash at the actual fighting part of the games, but I like the characters enough that I follow both the GG and the BB stories.
ShadowSoldier89
Member
"You can call me a doll, but I will no longer lose to you!"
"Understand a human's pain, Yuuki Terumi"
Cristina Vee is the best...
deadscreensky
Member
They absolutely could do subs for that. They don't, which is a shame -- like many people I always listen to the original voices when practical, and BlazBlue has a fantastic Japanese cast, love it -- but I don't see any good reason why Arc couldn't have offered subtitles as an option. It would obviously be distracting for competitive play, so it should be optional, but when you're spending ~30 hours on the story stuff that doesn't really matter. There's not so many unique character lines that subtitles wouldn't work. You don't need to subtitle obvious crap like name yelling.
Hopefully they will at least re-add in a voice test. Chronophantasma lacking that was really annoying since that was the only viable way for original audio listeners to get a translation of what the characters were saying during fights. This is assuming they have an English dub, of course, which is looking unlikely...
Just to be clear I do have sympathy for the English dub fans who probably won't be getting a dub here. That sucks. Though some of the early, apparently misaimed insults in this thread ("Aksys never gave a damn about the BB community, anyway") also make it clear why companies don't act transparent about this sort of thing in the first place.
...uh, yeah. They should totally just outright say it. It feels pretty scummy to just not comment on the matter entirely and leave tons of fans who identify these characters solely by their English VAs (and have for almost a decade) wondering until the game comes out and it presumably completely lacks for one. It's better people find out now instead of after they've spent money on something because Aksys has refused to be forthwith about information. All they're doing is pushing back an even more explosive backlash.
If all you have is bad news, the best thing to do is mitigate things.
Subs mid-battle in an ASW fighting game doesn't make a lot of sense.
deadscreensky
Member
If you can do subs in a super low-budget SD resolution shoot-em-up like Pink Sweets (which has English and Japanese subs at the same time) and have it work okay you can probably do the same in a 720p+ fighting game story mode.
He's the only one I'll miss.
Surprised so many people are mad when they kept changing VAs for some chars.
Other than the fact that their engine likely doesn't allow for that, mid-battle subs would result in dialogue over dialogue over dialogue for different moves performed at every other frame, as opposed to your example of a shoot-em up which very likely has subs during scripted moments.
cj_iwakura
Member
Just Terumi/Hazama(who is nearly indistinguishable) and Bang(blech) to my knowledge. The rest are iconic.
ShadowSoldier89
Member
there was a temporary switch where laura bailey covered rachel, that was only for CSE though
You named the exact two who I had in mind.
QisTopTier
XisBannedTier
That's such a minor amount in the overall package of things
It's not just the dub; they've done some ridiculous things over the years with the localization - just not the dubs. I can't think of any notable developers that have issues like this. So, basically, at this point it really isn't simply: "No dub, no buy." So much as it's: "Screw it, I'm sick of this. If you don't like selling the game over-seas, then I'm just not buying it." Have you even experienced the PS3 'errors' CSE had?
Also, why can't I have a dub in a game with Anime characters? Is there something wrong with wanting to understand what characters are saying? I don't speak Japanese. I don't get the 'real experience' by listening to jibberish. So why shouldn't I want voices I can understand so I don't spend the entire game reading subtitles instead of looking at the screen?
It's kinda like saying that anyone who wants to go out for authentic Mexican should want to order in fluent spanish and pay in Pesos. I guess, in some sense, the Mexican dining experience isn't truly Mexican unless we're in Mexico, but at some point I just want a Enchilada that's not from Taco Bell, and a Mexican run Mexican restaurant that accepts USD is perfectly fine.
P.S. Honestly, if a dub is that bad, I'll just turn voices off. Like in Bravely Default. Terrible dub, but perfectly O.K. because I prefer the voices off. I normally just read ahead in the text and skip the voices in the game anyways because I hate waiting for lines.
Oh, and as other people pointed out: It's not simply story mode. The battles had a ton of unique dialogue that was fun as heck. Having Makoto yell spoon, Nu make innuendos, and Carl asking people to sing was just fun; it gave the game a bit of personality.
P.P.S. Oh yeah, for the guy who asked: About the character voices people keep complaining about: The reason why people keep complaining is because their voice actors got replaced/screwed up after Arc Sys. switch to the double-discount localizes. The people who are complaining are complaining because they want the old English voices back from when the localization was good. Removing the english dub altogether is the opposite of what they wanted.
deadscreensky
Member
I doubt there's a game engine released in the last three decades that can't show text on the screen.
Pink Sweets doesn't only have subtitles during scripted moments, they also go off when you take damage, use a bomb, speed up/down, get a power-up, narrowly avoid an attack -- it's really not particularly different than a fighting game, actually. It also works when you're playing co-op, so two players isn't an issue either. It's a great example because it was never released outside of Japan so the translation is terrible (meaning very little effort was put into this), and like I mentioned the resolution is super low. So if Cave can make it work in that situation back in 2006 than Arc has no excuse a decade later.
More importantly it's like I said, BlazBlue only needs to subtitle important dialogue. You don't need to subtitle people yelling out their special moves, just the specific character to character dialogue about shitty rabbits and robotic sex innuendo, things like that. That stuff is not going off "every other frame". There's no real reason Arc couldn't do this, at least as an option.
Pink Sweets actually does subtitle every little dumb grunt and special move yell, which just shows how unobtrusively you can do something like this. This is a lousy recording (which I think helps my point), but you can see some of it in action here. Most of the subtitles in that video are admittedly really short, but during the rare times longer lines are said it works just as well. (A problem with using a better recording is high level Pink Sweets play inherently leads to less dialogue because you're avoiding things like power-ups to manage rank.)
The Yo Tornado
Member
Bang might as well be the overall package for how good his old VA was. Tony Oliver's performance is 75% of the reason Bang is my favorite FG character ever (FRKZ being the remaining 25%.)
cj_iwakura
Member
It's still no replacement for them yelling out things during battle. (Though it actually lead to a friend hating BB, heh. It got on his nerves.)
I'm partial to CT Jin's "you BITCH!" whenever Noel knocks him down.
tintin1029
Member
If I have to live in a world without Eng Makoto, I don't know what I'd do.
Not gonna stop me from buying it though.
Not gonna stop me from buying it though.
QisTopTier
XisBannedTier
cj_iwakura
Member
I also submit this shit would knock the Black Beast out.
Kokonoe's dub VA is a goddess.
Hahaha, Ragna.
I'm gonna miss that fool.
Lumination
'enry 'ollins
If I were still playing this competitively, I wouldn't be able to care about English VA.
Because I'm finally fed up with the wait between Japanese arcade releases and console releases, this is actually going to be the last straw.
Because I'm finally fed up with the wait between Japanese arcade releases and console releases, this is actually going to be the last straw.
QisTopTier
XisBannedTier
cj_iwakura
Member
He's incredible when he goes full BROOOOOOOOOOOTHERRRRR!.
Scrooge McDuck
Member
Waiting for the story to complete before arranging voice recording sessions would be cheaper too. This is pretty much my last hope.
If I'm not mistaken, Chronophantasma did something kinda similar with the English vanilla version taking out the Glossary but the Extend edition putting it back in?
Pretty much. After watching a lot of Japanese animation, the typical anime comedic and dramatic verbal cues are already very familiar to me so they're getting kinda stagnant. Hearing those kind of exaggerated outbursts in English is amazing.