Yikes, mate.....
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So, after turning the voice to Japanese i still find it rather dull and forgettable. I don't think the problem lies with the voice acting itself, but rather the lack of emotions and "sound effects". In older titles you'd feel more connected to the characters than you do in this title for some reasons i'd say:
-Fewer, more memorable line. Old games didn't had this huge amount of lines, you had around 2 short lines per "square", unlike FFXIV which almost every line is a wall of text that you'd barely remember 5 minutes after reading it, too much is said for little meaning.
-Character emotions are non-existent, they mostly just spew their lines, this isn't solely to the voice acting as well, it's the animation itself. There's some moments here and there but they're rare, most of the time they just stand there doing nothing with blank face talking to you. it's forgettable.
-"Sound effects", in previous FF titles, which had no voice acting, the emotion was compensated with having some sounds effects on par with their animations, like a "wiggle-wiggle" or some other silly things. I remember this a lot in FF7 for example.
This is some nice mmorpg and although the story is interesting, the way it's told and presented is quite mediocre and not on par with other FF's, but i don't think it would make sense to be, the costs with that quality on top with having mmo quality would be atrocious.
Because it's all basically spoiler still.. lol...
That could have been, too, yeah. Though, at least for me, that wouldn't have occurred to me with Alphinaud, because he's a known friend and ally. And because it was in that same room, etc... Now, had some other person, a stranger, brought the drinks in for both you and Alphinaud... yeah, my brain would have gone there again.
Only Balmung.
Why would a game that's littered with fanservice of previous FF games be anyone's first FF? And why would you skip cutscenes just because they're not voiced? Since this is your first FF game for someone reason let me just say that in the mainline titles the story carries the game. I don't know what it's like in World of Warcraft or whatever game you migrated from but this has always been the meat of mainline Final Fantasy games. It's amazing how you can spot a WoW refugee on the official forums when they complain about cutscenes in a franchise like Final Fantasy. I'd rather this game have no voice acting because the voice acting in this game from the English speakers sound worse than Final Fantasy X's voices, thank god for multiple audio tracks am I right?
When it comes to ARR both the JP and EN voice acting is atrocious which I'm going to attribute to a small budget and short recording time frame. The only ones who put out a convincing in EN performance were Urianger, Ilberd, and later on Alphinaud.
Sadly they had to change Urianger and Ilberd in 3.0 and I'm not fond of the changes, but they shifted from a US group to a UK group so at least we don't have the fake British accents anymore? But man, the 3.0 voice actors are across the board better with the exception of a few. I can't even stand to try the JP audio again because it sounds just as bland and generic as it did in ARR. ( ´_ゝ`)
I kinda wish we could use the KR voices because they sound pretty solid, but I know that's impossible.