Speech against Text

With the new Final Fantasy games evolving from text only to characters with speech, has the change helped? or has it just ruined the whole concept of the game.

I enjoyed it back when there was just text only, Final Fantasy X has put me off because of the annoying voice they gave Tidus.

Your views?

i thought that some of the voice acting was very poor, and that put me off a lot. Itd be good if we could choose not to suffer that voicing

There are definite advantages:

No text boxes disturb the screen and hide things from view.

You can concentrate on the characters gestures and facial expressions while they talk. This hasn’t been an issue in the days of old, when the little sprite simply didn’t have that many animations, but lately, with graphics having improved, the text boxes could kind of distract from appraciating a scene fully.

The voices are another good characteristic for the characters in a video game.

Ah, of course the old-school text boxes are adorable, and allow for jokes etc, and look cool, too… I especially like th solution for them in FF9, but even there, you can see they were really trying to keep them as small as possible, text bubbles more than text boxes, no set position and size on the screen…
It had to be done, the step towards voice acting, and it’s all for the better. The voice actors really aren’t THAT bad. I must say I have heard worse. Sadly. 🙁

I agree with tokiko, about the character emotions being more dynamic, but i miss the days of old with the text boxes..

But I think ill try and get used to the new voice acting era..

Originally posted by Alpott87
I enjoyed it back when there was just text only, Final Fantasy X has put me off because of the annoying voice they gave Tidus.
Are you saying you don’t like the whole speech over text movement because of one guys voice? I mean, Square was trying something out something new. Whether or not the character’s voices are annoying shouldn’t have anything to do with it. Get over it. The real important thing that matters is whether it actually adds something in terms of realism to the game, instead of taking away. There isn’t going to be the "perfect" voice for each character. Someone in the world is going to find it annoying. So, it shouldn’t matter if you find Tidus’ voice annoying.

I like the whole idea of voice acting. It adds real emotion to the game, when you see characters interacting with each other, in a way that was previously never done before.

It’s just the next logic step but quite enjoyable. You can put emotions in text sure, but a voice gives alot more emotion. By lowering it, sounding sad and happy in excitement. But needless to say it must be good voice actors or else it can ruin the moment or even the game. That’s the advantage of text since there is no voice that can possibly ruin it. I did like the voice casting in FFX, no complaints there.

Originally posted by Smokey

Are you saying you don’t like the whole speech over text movement because of one guys voice?

No, That was one example, it was just i would rather mention one person than to critically analyse ever single character.

Originally posted by Alpott87
No, That was one example, it was just i would rather mention one person than to critically analyse ever single character.
Well, it sounded like you only had one character you disliked. So, my apologies for misunderstanding you.

I found the speech helpful to me because it was more like a movie, and I could just sit back and watch them talk with out having to think, but I like the text better. It’s more classic, and I hate when the way I picture characters’ voices aren’t the way they sound. I like to imagine their voices, more than hearing them, so I can make them sound any way I want to. Either way, as long as I’m playing final fantasy, it doesn’t matter to me.

So in conclusion, I like both, but I prefer text.

Originally posted by Alpott87
I enjoyed it back when there was just text only, Final Fantasy X has put me off because of the annoying voice they gave Tidus.

Couldnt of said it better. If they give a character an annoying voice, I reach for the mute button. Also, being a sad case I like to rename the characters, which causes problems when you want to vocie their name.

There are things you can only pull off with text and there are things that you can only pull off with voice. Because this, the two have to take different steps to get to that effect… sometimes they might not even be able to get it at all.

In how FFX performed, I thought the voices were… well not great but they did deliver their lines and they’re all from respective lines of voice acting, especially Tidus. Square probably envisioned that Tidus himself is annoying. He is annoying but he can be pretty funny depending on how long you can stand up to him.

But personally, vocals do a great job, I find myself knowing the character a lot more with a voice attached rather than reading text.

I’ve been playing games since I was a little kid, so I got pretty used to text boxes over the years. I was more then a little nervous about the voice acting in X, but I didn’t think it was bad.

Like others have said, games are evolving. There are a lot of scenes in X that wouldn’t have worked nearly as well sans voice acting. While I’d never want to see voice acting added to a classic game, I’m all for using voice acting in newer games.