On replaying FFX

[owlmoose]

I've been thinking about replaying FFX again for awhile, and being at home sick for the last week ended up being a good time for it. (I'd also thought about playing along with moogle_university, but I decided I couldn't hold out until October. :) I can always replay again then if I'm inspired.) I haven't played FFX at all for several years, and I hadn't done a top-to-bottom replay in even longer; then again, I know the game so well by now I doubt there will be many real surprises. But that's not the point of a replay like this. It's more about sinking back into the world and spending time there, reminding myself of the voices and the faces and the story. I'm about twelve or so hours in, just reached the Thunder Plains.

A few stray thoughts:

• The Jecht Shot is ridiculously hard. I think I reloaded seven or eight times before I got it to work. FFX was the last game before the ability to skip cutscenes was introduced to the series, and there's also no way to reload besides restarting the PS2, so that was also annoying. I don't intend to play much blitzball, so I didn't really need the Jecht Shot. But I so much prefer the way the characterization works if Tidus is able to make it work that I decided it was worth it.


• The other choice I really care about: who dies at Operation Mi'ihen. Nothing against Gatta, but the scene with Luzzu and Wakka at Djose Temple is one of my favorites in the game, so when I accidentally kept Gatta alive I found myself going back to a previous save.


• One thing I noticed at Operation Mi'ihen: after Yuna performs her Sending, there are still bodies on the beach. I remember having a discussion about that issue either here or someone else's journal a few years back: do human corpses disappear after death the same way that dead fiends do? At least based on this evidence, the answer is no. I'll have to keep an eye out in future scenes.


• Tidus's voice acting is better than I remember. Yuna's, sadly, is worse. Maybe it only seems that way because she gets so much better in FFX-2, so that's the impression that remains in my head.

Comments

[owlmoose]

See, I don't think that is bad voice direction. Yes, he's grating. That's kind of the point. He's being a whiny teenager and whiny teenagers are *always* grating! :)

Basically, I think the voice acting in FFX gets a bad rap and I will defend it to the death (except for Yuna who so often sounds stilted and wrong, and I think that's largely because she was trying too hard to make her speech patterns match the Japanese mouth movements).

[auronlu]

This. All of it.

There are several characters in FFX I love despite their choppy voice acting. In Hedy Burgess' case, the lip synching attempts are a little distracting. I wish someone had told her to stop doing that before X-2.

[zen_monk]

I say that it's bad voice direction because of the behind-the-scenes facts where voice direction was mentioned. Such as having the direction be that they have to match the lip flaps when dubbing or that they feel compelled to sound just like the Japanese seiyuu.

Also, a lot of people I know blame the voice actors, which is very unfair because the ones who decide the quality and the overall sound of the acting is the voice director, and so that's really their responsibility. James Arnold Taylor is a very good voice actor, and it's unfortunate that because of Union rules, I think, that he doesn't voice in anime that often, because in other incarnations of Tidus he's actually very good. Hedy Buress as well, in X-2 and in Dissida and KH where she reprises Yuna. And X-2 actually got the lip flaps to match the English dub, as a well to assist the actors.

[owlmoose]

I haven't played any of the Dissidia games, so I can't comment on the voice acting there, but I agree about X-2 and KH. FFX definitely has its voice direction issues -- I guess some of the actors ignored the directive to try and match the lip movements -- mostly to do with it being the first time out. But specifically in the case of the whiny teenager moments, I still say that it's not bad voice acting or direction for them to be annoying, because I think it's very likely that they are *supposed* to be annoying. Just like the laughing scene is supposed to be awkward.

[zen_monk]

Firstly, I'm not disagreeing with you if the direction intended for characters like Tidus to sound annoying. The quality of how it sounds to me is based on my personal preference and it's my belief that it can sound better than it is now. If one were to compare Masakazu Morita's take on Tidus, such as in the scene in being angry with Auron, the difference between how he does it and James Arnold Taylor isn't just how each actor chose to act or how the director wanted them to sound. If there's a way to increase the quality in making "annoying" scenes with the acting and the direction, then it should be aspired to and not just have to settle for less.

[zen_monk]

By the way, I'm hoping that I'm not being persistently negative about it all, or picking fights, and if I were then I apologize. I'm recounting what I know of how the development was like when localizing it, and knowing it helps to explain parts of the voiced scenes which I thought didn't sound quite right or that it sounds like there were technical things underlying it. When I say that I wish some scenes were better sounding, I didn't mean that I want Tidus to be "less whiney" but that I think that it would be delivered better, and those moments are subjective.

[owlmoose]

Oh no, not at all. Although I appreciate this clarification, and the further information! I knew some of what you about the localization, but not all. And I do agree for sure that the voice direction could have been better. :) But I do tend to cut Square a little more slack than many since it was the first time they'd done localization with voice actors, especially since they've gotten so much better over time. Even X-2 is a significant improvement. And I'm really glad they learned from their mistakes! I found the voice acting in XIII, for example, to be one of the best parts of the game, for the most part.