Re: CoM Review - Re:Chain of Memories Triumphs Over Original Handheld Release
Key Wielder I'll say this much in regards to voice acting vs. bubble talk(I call it that lol) sometimes it will work and others it doesn't, but the thing about the bubble dialogue is you can give it your own flavor almost all the time. There was many of times I wished for bubble dialogue in KH2(anytime Areith Talked).
I liked the balance they had with it in KH1 is what I can say even BBS to an extent.
I can definitely appreciate your standpoint. That's something I enjoy as well, being able to interpret for myself and put my own mental voice if you will behind the words the characters are saying. At the same time, though, I feel like so much more emotion can be felt when you actually get the context from hearing the words. For example, in the original game when Axel says he's actually enjoying the situation, you really don't know what to think. Is he surprised, confused, happy, sad, nostalgic? When we hear Quinton Flynn ( <3 ) say it, though, we can definitely tell what Axel is feeling. It's just kind of nice, to me anyway, to have that confirmation. And the Aerith thing.......I won't disagree lol.
Although for BBS, the entire game was voiced, with the exception of speaking to NPCs for the purposes of buying things. Other than that, I believe there are no important or really story-relevant conversations left to speech bubbles in that game. That was something I loved about it; it made the emotions far more tangible, which is definitely a plus with such an emotional game like BBS.
The 14th Order said:
There is something to letting the gamer interpret the emotions of the characters through the text. I can't say I prefer one or the other, but why not just write a book if you wanted the audience to read everything? Not that I am throwing reading books under the rug, but the standard for games nowadays, on console at least, is for everything to speak that can have a voice. Sure, you can let the reader interpret everything, but having a creator that can effectively execute what they see in their mind as if experiencing it first hand; now that is genius.
I felt more from the Dark Riku in Re:CoM when he verbally abused Sora than in CoM just because I perhaps didn't take it in the same way as if I would witnessing the scene, or I was younger at the time, any number of things. You can gather more information if all of the senses are being utilized. The nuances in speech don't exist in written text. It's harder to pick up sarcasm or subtleties. Yet, it leaves less to the imagination. It's really give and take, but if it's pulled off, either one could be monumentally more successful than the other.
I personally enjoyed The cutscenes in Re:CoM more than I did in the GBA release for I just thought it was better at portraying the story than all dat text... Sometimes it was strenuous to read everything, and sometimes it disturbed the flow of the game. That can negatively affect the player's experience and no matter how good the story is, if the player doesn't want to bother with it, the story won't be told.
I agree on all of this, especially about Repliku. It's one thing to see what he is saying to Sora and know it's cruel, but to actually hear the words? That plucks on the heartstrings, especially after everything that happened in KH1. It's one thing to have exclamation points for emphasis, but the cruelty David Gallagher put into the character in Re:CoM was brilliant; it completely put the scenes with Repliku on another level for me emotionally.
I never found it strenuous to do the reading, to be honest, mainly because I'm a very fast reader, but that has its own problems--the words didn't pop up fast enough, which was frustrating. xD More seriously, though, it's just more wearing on the buttons. It may sound stupid but if I can avoid some wear and tear on a system by having cutscenes instead of speech bubbles, I'll take it.
Shinjuku said:
Plus sometimes some people don't need to talk games that have good voice acting like God of War and say Uncharted are few and far between.
There are some games with really shoddy VA work, I agree, and Uncharted (never played GoW) has absolutely fantastic VAing like you said. I've always rather liked the voices they have chosen for KH (it took a while to get used to Terra and Aqua, but I'd watched the Japanese trailers FAR too often lol), so I guess that just depends on individual preferences.
