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I think I'm done with knuckle sandwich. It might be the most disappointing game I've played all year. It has the YIIK problem where the combat absolutely drags because every action has a mini game attached, and every enemy has way too much hp. If you don't do a perfect job with them, you'll deal terrible damage and get shredded. The game also seemingly drops the insane twist the demo ended on.
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Nov 27, 2023 04:04
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Got to the "final" chapter of Astlibra and man, I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about this. First, doing an entire "oh yeah this ending was kinda lovely, but fight our secret bosses and maybe you can get the true ending!" is something I absolutely do not have a lot of patience for in this day and age. As much as I was interested in the story for the first 60% of the game, the last 40% of the game was honestly pretty predictable. Overall, my mind would have been blown entirely if I played this back in like 2002 when I was 14; not so much in 2023 when some of the twists this game goes for is just 13 Sentinels, but not quite as good. I can't knock it too much given what I know about how long the guy took to get this game out, but man I feel like this would have been a much bigger impact if I had played this earlier in my life. The game still goes very horny in a bad and distracting way, albeit nothing was as unabashedly horny and disturbing as Chapter 4. The creator I think went on an AMA on reddit recently and someone asked him "hey what was the deal with some of the horny plot points/bosses" and he was just like "I like sexy girls and it got good feedback on reddit." Yeah okay man. The gameplay was... honestly pretty rough and I don't feel like I had a lot of fun with it at all. Later on in the game the sprites get so loving busy and big and their attacks start having gigantic and completely undiscernable hitboxes, on top of every enemy in the game having some kind of hyper armor. And this is met with your own weapons getting heavier and heavier, i.e., slower unless you have very specific builds and the combat just starts feeling real loving bad. And I don't know what the gently caress they were thinking in the one chapter where they strip you of being able to access most abilities, including double jump and loving dashing, and still having you fight multiple enemies and bosses despite this. From a narrative perspective, I completely get why they did it, but from a gameplay perspective, it just felt really, really loving bad. Honestly not sure if I'm going to go through the rest of it at this point. Still have Mario RPG and Astral Ascent on deck for games remaining for me this year and I kind of don't want to end out the year with this game.
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Nov 27, 2023 05:37
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Has anyone other than me tried Long Days Gone? It's on sale now and is out of early access but I got it in one of the big itch bundles ages ago. So far my biggest complaint is the game's walking speed. No run button in towns. The plot so far (having completed the first major town) is a bit weird because the main character is (cmon this is not even a spoiler, the game even starts in media res this way before flashbacking to a few days earlier) a runaway from their scifi underground independent mercenary force, that the rest of the world knows as an 'impartial peacekeeping operation'... But the rest of the world is just, like... the world. Our world. You start the game attacking Kaliningrad dressed as Polish soldiers. Also the game has occasional little sniper segments.
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Nov 27, 2023 07:29
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buddychrist10 posted:Its hard to say. I loved OT2 but bounced off of OT1 and there were quite a few people who had a similar experience. I think the deciding factor may be how you felt about overworld travel. I tolerated it in OT2 because the rest of the game was so good. In OT1 the setting and plots weren't interesting enough to overcome wandering through underleveled overworld areas with too frequent encounters. If you didn't mind going between the towns too much it might be worth checking out. Also keep in mind that each character only has one path action so you'll have to do a lot more party shuffling to get access to certain actions. Yeah, my issue in OT1 is that I just didn't care about its plots. But I wanted to find out what happened next in the OT2 ones.
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Nov 27, 2023 07:33
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MechaX posted:The gameplay was... honestly pretty rough and I don't feel like I had a lot of fun with it at all. Later on in the game the sprites get so loving busy and big and their attacks start having gigantic and completely undiscernable hitboxes, on top of every enemy in the game having some kind of hyper armor. And this is met with your own weapons getting heavier and heavier, i.e., slower unless you have very specific builds and the combat just starts feeling real loving bad. And I don't know what the gently caress they were thinking in the one chapter where they strip you of being able to access most abilities, including double jump and loving dashing, and still having you fight multiple enemies and bosses despite this. From a narrative perspective, I completely get why they did it, but from a gameplay perspective, it just felt really, really loving bad.[/spoiler] I'm down with like 70% of this post but calling the gameplay rough is wild to me, the hitstop is so cool!!! with the kind of options the game gives you with the weapon mastery karon skill stuff it feels like its practically begging you to create some kind of broken build that trivializes all combat but I thought the feel of it up to the end was really nice and crunchy. anyway I've been on a dungeon crawl kick lately thats taken me through Wizardry Labyrinth of Lost Souls and now I'm in the beginning of Etrian Odyssey 3. I dunno what it is about this genre but I respect that its an incredibly pared down experience compared to a lot of rpgs and I like that the later game difficulty is on winning encounters. tho as I predicted I did get salty the first time an enemy lowered my level in Wizardry LoLS. Has anybody played the touhou blobber? I hear its extremely good but I'd like to read some posts
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Nov 27, 2023 08:44
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MechaX posted:Got to the "final" chapter of Astlibra and man, I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about this. The postgame really does not feel like that at all in my experience. The secret bosses are signposted relatively early on and they're just a means to get the best base equipment in the game, the real ending has pretty much nothing to with them. The actual postgame is the third act of the story in the same way as DQXI's "postgame" and a lot of it is played for catharsis and laughs. It also goes further than just remixing the content you've already gone through, no repeating solved puzzles either. The story presents a new threat (well "new" in so far as you've presumably fought it before but were not given the information to fully grasp the true scope and nature of the threat) as well as makes the physical structure of the known world a key plot point. Pretty much every mystery or vagueness about the setting gets sorted out. Everything starts to fall into place in a really satisfying way that the original campaign's finale lacked. Also, every single attack with a weirdly huge hitbox becomes an opportunity to self-heal with the Karon skill that recovers your hp when your Possession barrier comes up so none of the later fights ever actually felt bad to me. e: whoops Runa fucked around with this message at 13:03 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 09:18
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Your spoiler is broken
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Nov 27, 2023 09:32
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Pyrus Malus posted:Has anybody played the touhou blobber? I hear its extremely good but I'd like to read some posts Which Touhou blobber, Labyrinth of Touhou (the Etrian Odyssey one) or Artificial Dream in Arcadia (the SMT one)? I've been playing the latter and it's fun, although compared to normal SMT it feels more focused on picking a team you like and getting more levels and skills onto them, rather than constantly fusing up the next new thing.
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Nov 27, 2023 10:55
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Touhou Bloober
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Nov 27, 2023 10:56
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Sakurazuka posted:Touhou Bloober finally, the yokai will actually be scary 😨
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Nov 27, 2023 10:59
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Thuryl posted:Which Touhou blobber, Labyrinth of Touhou (the Etrian Odyssey one) or Artificial Dream in Arcadia (the SMT one)? I've been playing the latter and it's fun, although compared to normal SMT it feels more focused on picking a team you like and getting more levels and skills onto them, rather than constantly fusing up the next new thing. the first, Labyrinth of Touhou. I didn't know about the second one but I'll check it out too
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Nov 27, 2023 12:14
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labyrinth of touhou 2 is a best in class of the genre. Its idiosyncratic in ways that put other DRPGs to shame. Superficially it can be dismiss as a overheard EO clone but the game's approach to combat and character building is its own entire thing.
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Nov 27, 2023 12:29
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MechaX posted:The game still goes very horny in a bad and distracting way, albeit nothing was as unabashedly horny and disturbing as Chapter 4. The creator I think went on an AMA on reddit recently and someone asked him "hey what was the deal with some of the horny plot points/bosses" and he was just like "I like sexy girls"
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Nov 27, 2023 13:55
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Pyrus Malus posted:the first, Labyrinth of Touhou. I didn't know about the second one but I'll check it out too labyrinth of touhou 2 owns, every character has their own unique little niche and putting it all together is cool. some of the post-game stuff is grindy but thats my only real complaint
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Nov 27, 2023 13:57
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Eiyuden Chronicle Rising is kinda fun! Feels a bit to close to a mobile game but not necessarily in a bad way
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Nov 27, 2023 14:03
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Endorph posted:what reason would you prefer I would prefer if a lot of what happened in the game just didn’t happen at all on this subject
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Nov 27, 2023 14:17
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thats fine but sometimes we must accept artists are perverts
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Nov 27, 2023 16:11
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i think it's important for writers to enjoy their work
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Nov 27, 2023 16:12
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Finally cleared a game out of my backlog, the SFC version of Trials of Mana on the Collection of Mana. (The furthest I had gotten in the game previously was the Darkshine Knight on Duran's path on emulator, before I knew that Level 2 and 3 techs turned the B button into a suicide button.) Time has definitely not been kind to this game, though it was still a fun romp. I cleared out Riesz's path using Hawkeye and Kevin as my back up, and started another file using Kevin, Duran and Charlotte so I can have another physical focused party that approaches magic support a bit differently. I'll probably go for a magic focused team with Angela at some point, but not looking too forward to that since fighting via magic in this game is about as fun and interesting as watching paint dry. Probably the most mundane but roughest thing about the SFC version of Trials is how unbelievably laggy the menus are. Every time I have to update my equipment or sort my inventory, I just deflate because the whole process takes 30 seconds to a minute longer than it needs to.
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Nov 27, 2023 16:14
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there is so much content in OT2, I feel like its gonna take me to 100 hours till i'm satisfied with collecting everything. just started exploring on the boat and finding all these secrets side dungeons or puzzles off the beaten path of the main stories. Finished Hikari and Osvalds tales Hikari probably my favorite so far, just enjoy the themes. The friend he couldn't bring back, the friend he was able to. Finding new friends with the gladiator people. Probably the route so far I wouldn't mind a full game on. And Hikari was by far the most OP I had in my party. Noticed that he preached peace, but noticed he always go like "I fight for my friends and peace, and desire no more bloodshed ect.......but if you get in my way, I won't hesitate to loving kill you motherfucker" the whole game lol. I liked that he still promised a more peaceful kingdom at the end, but just setting all the lands and territory "free" suddenly is gonna make more problems than not. Like the desert country that Mugen assassinated and took over, yea. But the ones that's been in control for generations..it be better to just keep governing them, but just not with an iron fist. The story with Rei Muai or whatever girl was interesting. From the flashback, she's actually a bit older than Hikari. Osvald So far, the route I played so far with the most evil villain so far. The rest had some tragedy or were controlled by something. But Harvey was all him, imo. Thought it amusing that Osvald didn't understand what feeling it was, and the assistant was like "its love" Looks like after I finish every route, it might clear more things up in a final chapter. So now I finished my A team's routes. Throne, Hikari, Temenos, and Osvald. So I have the other 4, the team of catgirl, drugs, dancer, merchant. I feel like I totally stacked team A with all the powerhouse DPS, but I see how I make do with the rest. They're all at like lv14 or so, so starting from low level/skill options again, though they're be boosted significantly with endgame items.
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Nov 27, 2023 17:17
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Your B team is also incredibly powerful. Castti basically allows you to delete random encounters on the first turn if you build her right
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Nov 27, 2023 17:24
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Rascyc posted:Big fan of Wildermyth https://store.steampowered.com/app/763890/Wildermyth/ Oh yeah, gonna echo Wildermyth too.
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Nov 27, 2023 17:25
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You can clear almost all trash with turn 1 Inventor's catapult with some additional passives. Just slap on the obvious ones that lets you drop as much as possible turn 1. Your B team has some of the best boss killers in the game once you get unlocks. Enjoy the team
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Nov 27, 2023 17:34
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Thanks for all the recommendations! I picked up Troubleshooter, Ys 8, and Cosmic Star Heroine. I already owned Wildermyth, Sorcery, and several others mentioned so maybe I'll pick those back up. I'm going to wait on Small Saga since it just came out, though it does look pretty good.
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Nov 27, 2023 17:39
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I wasn't a big fan of Labyrinth of Touhou 2. The level design ended up really annoying me as the game went on. It's not really that similar to Etrian though. The two are very different games.
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Nov 27, 2023 17:55
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pixel bitches posted:Your B team is also incredibly powerful. Castti basically allows you to delete random encounters on the first turn if you build her right Honestly everyone except Osvald can break the game with almost no significant effort Osvald can break it too, he just takes a little more effort and focus than the rest
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Nov 27, 2023 17:58
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Finally clawed my way to the end of Valkyria Chronicles 2 after all these years last night and I wish I could say I enjoyed it more but there's so many problems I have with that game compared to VC1 and 4. Forcing it onto PSP during that era really seemed to limit what they could do with the map designs leading to not a whole lot of variety in scenarios between them. Either you were conquering some bases, having to kill a certain enemy, finding some packages or escorting a vehicle to a certain point. That was about it, not much variety beyond that and by the time you're about half way through the game you've seen just about every enemy type or scenario there is to see. The final 3 missions mixes it up a little bit, but kind of too little too late. The story and characters are also absolute complete rear end compared to the original and probably a big part of the reason it took me years to finish it all. Like the OG was still very anime tropey, but it wasn't high school level shenanigans dumb. The animated cutscenes also look like complete rear end for the most part (especially the one where a major antagonist Audrey dies which looks absolutely loving ridiculous with them just spinning the frame around like it's an old 70's super robot show with basically no animation budget to speak of), though I've always found A-1 Pictures super overrated in that department even after they started getting bigger budgets and better marketing from their parent company, which they didn't back when this game was released. Every game I've ever seen where they handled the in game animated cutscene production like Persona 4 or Phoenix Wright Spirit of Justice they basically look noticeably like poo poo though regardless of when the game came out. I managed to get a translated version of VC3 which is still stuck on PSP so it could very well have similar issues and I can't tell if the story/characters are going to be more engaging with it reverting to the time period of the great war and being about a crack squad of misfits, or if it's just going to be edgy and dumb. I do like the sound of actually getting to have a Valkyria Squad member and it apparently being a lot more challenging than VC2, but we'll see. I have VC4 and while I got distracted from that too it was light years ahead of VC2 in terms of my engagement in the narrative and gameplay. If nothing else the animated cutscenes I've seen for VC3 (apparently handled by Production I.G that time) noticeably look less completely like poo poo.
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Nov 27, 2023 18:09
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VC3 is much better than 2. Still small maps, but the leveling mechanic isn't a disaster. Also lots of fun to be had with 1 AP tanks.
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Nov 27, 2023 18:17
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CullenDaGaDee posted:Finally cleared a game out of my backlog, the SFC version of Trials of Mana on the Collection of Mana. (The furthest I had gotten in the game previously was the Darkshine Knight on Duran's path on emulator, before I knew that Level 2 and 3 techs turned the B button into a suicide button.) Time has definitely not been kind to this game, though it was still a fun romp. I cleared out Riesz's path using Hawkeye and Kevin as my back up, and started another file using Kevin, Duran and Charlotte so I can have another physical focused party that approaches magic support a bit differently. I'll probably go for a magic focused team with Angela at some point, but not looking too forward to that since fighting via magic in this game is about as fun and interesting as watching paint dry. Probably the most mundane but roughest thing about the SFC version of Trials is how unbelievably laggy the menus are. Every time I have to update my equipment or sort my inventory, I just deflate because the whole process takes 30 seconds to a minute longer than it needs to. You can definitely tell that game pushed the SNES to its absolute limit, laggy menus were worth it being one of the best looking sprite games ever lol
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Nov 27, 2023 18:23
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SFC Trials's horrible menu lag is a reason why I started refusing to play the game without Charlotte, because everyone else has to rely on item healing until at least the first promotion, and you're only allowed to have 10 round drops/chocolates on your quick ring at a time and have to go into the storage to reload them constantly. Great game that I've played through multiple times, but the edges are rough and painful.
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Nov 27, 2023 18:24
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trials is probably one of the biggest examples of a game that Needed a remake. secret of mana's combat was already kinda weird and rough. trials' combat was a bizarre mess
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Nov 27, 2023 18:26
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Trials of Mana Remake was super carried by Angela's amazing valley girl VA.
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Nov 27, 2023 18:29
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OddObserver posted:VC3 is much better than 2. Still small maps, but the leveling mechanic isn't a disaster. Also lots of fun to be had with 1 AP tanks. Yeah what was up with the recommended level of the stages suddenly exponentially skyrocketing after about October in game anyway? Like it went from roughly on par with where my squad levels were to suddenly 10-15 levels above what mine were. Not that it seemed to make as huge a difference as I might have though, but did they seriously expect people to grind that hard at that point? Also forgot to mention how much I loathed the class change system. That's another reason it took so long to beat the game for me, I just kept getting frustrated at it not dropping the materials I needed to class change the characters I planned to use for their roles because for some dumb rear end reason they chose to make it completely random for the most part. I'd let the game down for sometimes over a year, only to come back and try to finish it and run into that wall again and be like "oh yeah this is why I shelved it again". I eventually just got fed up and used an emulator and save states to force it to give me the items or I'd probably still be there trying to do that for some characters like Cosette and Reiner. It genuinely matters too because those are some massive upgrades to the characters stats. I even remember trying to explain to a friend how it works and why it sucks and him just not getting it at all. He kept insisting that I should deploy less characters to increase the likelihood that the ones I want would get the upgrade mats I wanted them to get even though I explained countless times to him that that's not the way it worked and it was in fact much dumber and more frustrating than that.
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Nov 27, 2023 18:33
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i did not find dub angela particularly better than any other of the dub voices, who were all very bad
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Nov 27, 2023 18:38
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As if!
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Nov 27, 2023 18:39
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sorry. i've never been in the funny dub accent gang.
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Nov 27, 2023 18:40
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exquisite tea posted:Trials of Mana Remake was super carried by Angela's amazing valley girl VA. I couldn't play that game in English even if I wanted too. It had positively heinous Tri-Ace game tier English dub voice acting for so many characters, where the quality of the dubbing varied wildly between whether the person had actual experience in the field of anime/game dubbing (Alejandro Saab/Hawkeye, Brittany Cox/Riesz, Angela/Sarah Miller-Crews) or virtually none at all (Chawrette/Alana Marie Cheuvront). Even then despite a lot of them knowing better they seemed to get really bad voice direction a lot of the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUhLNSMyV48 Not sure about Kevin's VA, but I know for a fact that Brittany Cox is a veteran of anime dubbing, yet sounds stilted and stiff as if she's being directed from a teleprompter without even context for the scene or something. Probably done over the phone with no description for even what her character looks like and what her personality is and where they are supposed to be while having this discussion. Either way the dub director heard this obviously flubbed take, decided it was good enough and chose to include it in the retail release voice over audio so that says a lot to me right there.
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Nov 27, 2023 18:44
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I honestly have to wonder if the Remakes dubbing is bad on purpose, cause it really feels like they're shooting for that era of PS1 voice acting where they'd literally just get randos off the street who happened to speak English for their English language track. Not gonna lie, I find it kind of charming, but I definitely am someone with a "So bad it's good" mindset for a lot of things so I get why others would be put off by it.
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Nov 27, 2023 19:05
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CullenDaGaDee posted:I honestly have to wonder if the Remakes dubbing is bad on purpose, cause it really feels like they're shooting for that era of PS1 voice acting where they'd literally just get randos off the street who happened to speak English for their English language track. Not gonna lie, I find it kind of charming, but I definitely am someone with a "So bad it's good" mindset for a lot of things so I get why others would be put off by it. Star Ocean II's original dub kind of remains the benchmark in that category for me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSv4RvWLH68 Comparison of the English redub which is mostly fine and Japanese dub. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0PTwOz6CAY Compilation of character battle quotes from "old faithful" PSX 1999 dub. For some reason some of the samples in the game were even left in Japanese that I recall it was that much of a rush job. Seem to recall Tractor Beam just being the JP voice sample for Rena. Kale fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 19:27
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I love how to slowly drifts from badly voiced anime protag to cartoon greaser and then back again
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Nov 27, 2023 19:32
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