A Valley Without Wind's Switch To Side View -- The Big Picture

[keith.lamothe]

The terrible, terrible voice acting didn't help its case, either.  Heh.

That's really funny, the voice acting was part of why 10 was so enjoyable for me.  Perhaps I have no taste

But yea, the story did go downhill in quality.  The difference between that and 7-9 is that the story didn't totally tailspin into noncomprehensibleness (yea, it's not a real word and it's impossible to read, that's the point), it merely got less cool (and a bit crazier).  8 was particularly surreal.  9 felt like it was trying to have another Kefka and just gave up.  I still enjoyed them, though.

12's story is a lot more military-political and much easier to follow than 7-9's "existentialism getting thrown at the wall until it sticks".  If you haven't played 12 I highly recommend it.

On VP, emulator on OSX... yea, that could be a challenge, a big one.  I highly suggest a windows device; VP wasn't the stablest even on the PSX disks, because they were really really pushing the storage capacity even on two disks.  Although that's also one of the reasons to buy the disks (Tri-ace deserves the money, great game) and just play an iso on the emulator.  Though I don't think there's any way of procuring the PS1 version in a way where Tri-ace would actually get the money; I think the PSP version is still for sale, though.

[Nalgas]

Or you can, you know, BUY it Although the original is about $65, but you can get Lenneth (The remake) if you have a PSP for $9.

Yes, buy it...and play it in an emulator.  I don't own anything else that can play PSX games.  I own several PSX games but have never owned a Sony console.  When the original PlayStation was out, I had a fast enough Mac and Virtual GameStation, and it played legitimate copies of the games just as well as the real hardware did.  I still have LoM and FF7 and stuff sitting on my shelf.  They've just always gone in my computer or a friend's console, not my own.

That's really funny, the voice acting was part of why 10 was so enjoyable for me.  Perhaps I have no taste

Some people really liked it, but it bothered me more often than not, and it was particularly annoying because they had a one second delay for every...single...line...before you could push the button to skip through it, even if you'd finished reading the text already.

If you haven't played 12 I highly recommend it.

I've been really torn on whether to or not.  Every time I see something about it it seems alternately like it'd either fix everything that bugs me about the rest or I'd hate it even more than all the rest of them combined.  I guess there's only one way to find out...

On VP, emulator on OSX... yea, that could be a challenge, a big one.  I highly suggest a windows device; VP wasn't the stablest even on the PSX disks, because they were really really pushing the storage capacity even on two disks.  Although that's also one of the reasons to buy the disks (Tri-ace deserves the money, great game) and just play an iso on the emulator.  Though I don't think there's any way of procuring the PS1 version in a way where Tri-ace would actually get the money; I think the PSP version is still for sale, though.

Oh, I have a burly Windows desktop, so that's not a problem.  I just don't have anything set up on it to play PSX games at the moment.  I was just screwing around with OS X ones in the hope of having something other than AI War and Civ4 that would run on my laptop when I'm stuck elsewhere.  Heh.

[x4000]

I think he was talking about buying the game, but playing it on his PC instead of on a PSX.  I suspect it might also be available from Sony on their official PSX emulator on the PS3?  A lot of the Square games are on there for really low prices.

EDIT: Wow, I'm late to the party.  Missed the next page.

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, right, the PS3 can play PSX games, even if only a certain sub-model can play PS2, I keep forgetting that.

My PS3 burned out   I think I burned out 2, possibly 3 PSX's.

[x4000]

Overall I was sort of in the middle about the FFX voice acting.  The timing was unabashedly terrible, but that wasn't the fault of the voice actors -- the Japanese text often took longer to say, apparently, and Square didn't bother shrinking the time gaps between lines for the localized versions.  That right there made the dialogue feel hideously unnatural in a lot of places it shouldn't have, especially when someone is happily exclaiming over something that someone else just said (Tidalis, Rikku) or saying something simple like "Yes" (Yuna, a lot).  

The characters who had longer lines that were more interesting (Lulu, Auron, Wakka) really showed off the strength of how good that voice acting really was, I think.  It was really well voice acted throughout, I think, but the cutscene editing was localized horribly.  So I can see why people feel both ways, and feel sort of both ways myself.  It depends on which part you focus on (the horrible pauses, or what is actually being said).

I'd love to see a version with tightened editing on those cutscenes, and then I think people would really appreciate just how good the acting part actually was.

[Cyborg]

I think part of the problem people have as they moved through the final fantasy series was they were always chasing what made the previous entries great, and I think that as a general rule, when you were younger your imagination was to the point that you can enjoy a much wider array of content. Chances are, at least for the people in this conversation, you were a kid when Kefka reigned supreme and by the time Sin came around, you were probably adult. Those are entirely two separate brains, two separate experiences, and it's really hard to chase the imagination of youth for most people. FF6 came around for me at a time when I hated everything about school, and I dove in to that story with both feet. I can honestly say it felt like an experience for me at the time, and looking back on it, I am able to recall that feeling of it being an experience. I suspect that a lot of final fantasy fans feel the same way in the way it might have affected them, and that has to do with a brain capable of imagination.

When I play games, I try not to get bogged down in reality or "that's not real life." Chasing realism, is that really fun? Is that what we want final fantasy to be?

Re-examining ff7, there are actually a variety of adult topics in there completely lost on a younger mind. Talking about genetic engineering, cloning, environmental catastrophe, and mixing that with the concept of a "deity" ( I put this in quotes because it's a far different god concept than previous entries)... it's really not such a bad story. It might not make sense at first, but I promise, if you actually do the adventure in that world and participate in more than just plowing through the main story arc, it's really rewarding. And that's coming from someone who prefers ff6, which is a better story in my opinion but far simpler to understand. Morality is much clearer in ff6 than any entry which comes afterwards in the whole series. That should be celebrated, but maybe it just gets bogged down in confusion because it does take a fair amount of effort to get the whole story. Hell, I was maybe 19 when I first played ff8 and I gave up the first time after realizing Edea wasn't the true villain because I thought it was stupid. I went back later and actually got to understand it and focused on enjoying the content that was there instead of trying to make it all make sense to me right away.

That's harder to do when you get older. For those of you with kids, maybe you should leave a copy of ff7 lying around and see if they put it into a console someday to see what it is.

[Nalgas]

The characters who had longer lines that were more interesting (Lulu, Auron, Wakka) really showed off the strength of how good that voice acting really was, I think.

I think that's a pretty good point.  I generally liked some of the characters like Auron who didn't get their dialog too mangled.  They've worked out that issue a whole lot better in more recent games.  The Last Remnant has some pretty bizarre issues where the lip syncing at times doesn't actually match either of the languages, but overall the timing and flow is relatively natural for both of them.  I assume FF13 has improved further on that.

[Cyborg]

The characters who had longer lines that were more interesting (Lulu, Auron, Wakka) really showed off the strength of how good that voice acting really was, I think.

I think that's a pretty good point.  I generally liked some of the characters like Auron who didn't get their dialog too mangled.  They've worked out that issue a whole lot better in more recent games.  The Last Remnant has some pretty bizarre issues where the lip syncing at times doesn't actually match either of the languages, but overall the timing and flow is relatively natural for both of them.  I assume FF13 has improved further on that.

I didn't like the American voice acting because English voice acting pales in comparison to their Japanese counterparts. The English language has the superior vocabulary to any other language in the world as far as specificity(many business contracts are often written in English), but what Americans do not have to offer with their language is tone and pitch. The Japanese language has incredible poetry and the tone and pitch for their words is borderline musical. It just sounds beautiful, and when you convey emotion in that language, it comes through extremely expressively in a way that you just cannot do with the English language. Their language, their writing, it oozes culture, and I would have appreciated the voice acting far more in their delivery than the American one forced upon us.

[Nalgas]

Re-examining ff7, there are actually a variety of adult topics in there completely lost on a younger mind. Talking about genetic engineering, cloning, environmental catastrophe, and mixing that with the concept of a "deity" ( I put this in quotes because it's a far different god concept than previous entries)... it's really not such a bad story.

The problem I have with it is that it's all well and good to try to tackle difficult topics like that, but they just weren't good enough writers to pull it off well enough.  They got kind of bogged down in trying to cover all those different things and fit them all together, and it just didn't quite work, at least for me.  There have been plenty of books and movies and TV shows that have attempted similar things and actually pulled it off successfully with much more depth and insight, thanks to better, more skilled writers.  They of course don't have the gameplay elements that make FF7, though, so they're not very satisfying when you want to play a game.  Heh.

I didn't like the American voice acting because English voice acting pales in comparison to their Japanese counterparts.

As much as I passionately hate almost anything dubbed and will whack myself in the nuts rather than watch anything that isn't subtitled, I will be the first to admit that many, many Japanese voice actors are terrible.  Some of them are great, but very few of them seem to actually speak like real people do.  A lot of them overact or just otherwise can't act very well to begin with.  I have a much easier time overlooking it than when people do it in English, because my Japanese is pretty bad compared to my English, so it doesn't bother me too much.  I absolutely prefer stuff to be in the original language whenever possible/practical, but that doesn't mean the original doesn't have its own problems, too.

[Echo35]

Or you can, you know, BUY it Although the original is about $65, but you can get Lenneth (The remake) if you have a PSP for $9.

Yes, buy it...and play it in an emulator.  I don't own anything else that can play PSX games.  I own several PSX games but have never owned a Sony console.  When the original PlayStation was out, I had a fast enough Mac and Virtual GameStation, and it played legitimate copies of the games just as well as the real hardware did.  I still have LoM and FF7 and stuff sitting on my shelf.  They've just always gone in my computer or a friend's console, not my own.

And? You can get a PS1 for around $10-20.

[Nalgas]

And? You can get a PS1 for around $10-20.

I just really hate the controllers, for one thing.  That's one of the main things that's stopped me from buying any of Sony's consoles ever.  They hurt my thumbs.  And at this point, it's just easier to emulate old stuff in some cases.  Don't have to worry about disc read errors, don't have to make space on your shelf for the console, etc.  And I can still import my old virtual memory cards from VGS into any emulator on any system these days and play using my old save files anywhere, which is nice.  I'm a little spoiled by that when I go between my real SNES and my Dingoo and get disappointed that I can't do the same thing there.  Heh.

[Ozymandiaz]

I still got my PS1 on the shelf actually, and FFVII on the shelf as well, along with some of my old favorites like Wipeout and Crash Bandicoot.

FFVI I only got in form of emulator though

I kinda like the Sony controllers, but I guess that is becuase I went straight from NES to PS1 controllers. I never had a SNES myself, but a friend did, and I only got to expereince the good SNES games later when I got hold of an emulator. Kinda funny getting a fairly decent computer and getting a SNES emulator

But I guess PS1 games is fairly easy to emulate now a days. Even my PSP can do em easily enough. Think I got FFVII on my PSP as well when I think about it...

[Echo35]

And? You can get a PS1 for around $10-20.

I just really hate the controllers, for one thing.  That's one of the main things that's stopped me from buying any of Sony's consoles ever.  They hurt my thumbs.  And at this point, it's just easier to emulate old stuff in some cases.  Don't have to worry about disc read errors, don't have to make space on your shelf for the console, etc.  And I can still import my old virtual memory cards from VGS into any emulator on any system these days and play using my old save files anywhere, which is nice.  I'm a little spoiled by that when I go between my real SNES and my Dingoo and get disappointed that I can't do the same thing there.  Heh.

I have a Wiz myself, but it's simply not the same. Good for portability, but I own at least half the games (And consoles they're associated with) on my Wiz in physical form.

[Nalgas]

I have a Wiz myself, but it's simply not the same. Good for portability, but I own at least half the games (And consoles they're associated with) on my Wiz in physical form.

Yeah, it really isn't quite the same, and I keep the originals around that I still have for that reason, but it's a little hard to bust out the NES on the subway.  Heh.

[superking]

interesting, I still consider FF7 to be the best FF game by a huge margin (and one of the all-time best games ever, although I last played it when I was 16), although as mentioned the story does pinwheel into oblivion at the end like all FF games. one thing it had over all the others was masculinity.. when I see all the fair faced male characters wearing oversmall cardigans or looking straight outta' yu-gi-oh I realise what a blessing the FF7 (absence of) character graphics were..