FF XIII soundtrack changed in the west to R&B singer

Who cares? its Final Fantasy.

I don't think the lack of JPOP or whatever will hurt my experience in the game if I decide to play it anyway....it might make some of Final Fantasies hardcore gamers (read: Weeabooish fanboys) upset, but it won't upset me.

 

To be honest, I'm a bit mixed about it.

The first minute of the song My Hands didn't really sound too bad to me, but once the R&B-vibes kicked in I had to turn it off and go get myself some mental health care. (Yeah... I kinda don't like R&B, along with a few other music styles that just wont click with me.)

In general, I'm NOT looking forward to Final Fantasy XIII. Nothing about it impresses me or makes me even remotely interested (in any positive ways, that is). The art direction, main cast, design choices and such just puzzles me in a way that makes me believe someone's just trying their hardest to piss as much essence of trendy into a bucket before shipping it; with no intentions of paying any attention to functionality, purpose, in-game world culture, and believable and consistent design/setting. This being one of the things I believe to also be part of the issue as far as higher level acceptance and appreciation of this interactive media goes. Samples of common audio/visual issues with games are; Broken/stupid narratives, terribly shallow and poor characters, and non-plausible cultural aspects and designs.


Also, on the subject of the song thing; I still think, as far as vocal tracks goes, VIII and IX handled it best.

 

Any word on whether they're going to add the option for Japanese dub this time? I bought FFXII not even questioning that in this day and age the biggest name in RPGs would make sure the option was there, but apparently not. Call me a "weaboo" or whatever the fuck you like but if I'm watching a movie or playing a game then I'll take the original dub wherever possible.

 

hmmm if there is a love story going on, in this Final Fantasy instalment, then we can always hope she sings I will Always Love you from her X-factor days. But just for the record, she does have a very lovely voice. Even though I hate X-factor .. both the domestic and foreign version (whether the singers are good at what they do or not) , and also I hate any kind of talent or no talent shows. Even though there are awesome performers, such as Terry Fator to mention one who is a multi talented fellow. In quite a few of them. But I am honest now, and I think it is a sack of shit both the talent shows, and the hype all those games get in the long run. What ever happened to the GOOD story driven games and what not ?

 

Meh.

 

Bummer.

Trying to expand their market? I don't get it.

 

You're probably right. It's mostly a "casual" thing. I believe S-E had some sort of explanation for the whole shift of fanbase in regards to FF, and that being that old customers will outgrow it or something and new people should be drawn into it (ie. fanbase not big enough, let's ditch them and target a bigger audience)

Of course, there will always be those who'll gobble up anything with a name and/or hype associated with it. 'Cause at the end of the day, they majority of them are there for the pretty fireworks and not the gameplay. They really don't have an opinion on what's good (both in narrative design and as far as gameplay is concerned) as they don't really need it. Others can make those decisions for them, or they don't need them. As long as the interactivity doesn't stop them from seeing pretty colors, it's all good :nod:

You probably wont see that option in FFXIII. Based on the trailers, the localization process seems to be thorough and strong (both on the actor front and editing of dialog and terminology. At this point, I would almost say I wouldn't be surprised if they're even doing dual renders of FMVs for proper lipsynch.) Basically, in a lot of game productions these days, the Japanese is almost like the new placeholder audio (and in general, my personal opinion is that the Japanese audio in a lot of games is sometimes horribly out of place, often limits the potential of a good translation/localization job and is also just as often as poorly delivered, if not worse, than several English dubs people like to complain about.)

Anyway, with the way they still o so heavily rely on the use of pre-rendered cutscenes in FFXIII, I wouldn't be surprised if they probably find themselves unable to keep both audio-tracks there without having to heavily affect quality of stuff. Not everyone is able to easily cram multiple audio languages into their games it seems... regardless of how much space they have...

 

wtf

 

Well, who still plays FF series? Everything after part IX didn't hold my attention. The sorry voice acting in X made it worse. I have played through part of XII, but never finished it.

 

final fantasy died with 7

 

The only people up in arms about this will be the worthless weeaboos.

I'm glad they fixed this.

 

Japanese audio is "out of place" in a Japanese game (one like FF, with anime-styled characters and all that shit)? You're going to have to have a pretty convincing example to back that up.

I dare say on technical merits that's true sometimes. I hate watching any non-Western animation without the proper dub, though. It just doesn't feel right. The last one I sat through the entirety of was Spirited Away, in the cinema and as good an English dub as that is held to be, it still rubbed me up the wrong way.

Well, I can think of a rational response: ditch the pre-rendered movies and do it in-game. It's 2009 for fuck's sake.

I'll understand it if they ditch the alternative dub for the 360, but for PS3 there's really no excuse. That said, I don't own a PS3 and probably won't for some time, so the whole affair is probably moot from my perspective...

 

Well, for starters, just 'cause it's made in Japan doesn't mean it's set in Japan or even a remotely close to Asian setting.

Sure, one could argue that Japanese audio combined with the use of a relatively unfamiliar language helps create a better feeling of a "this is not taking place at my place"-setting, but it doesn't change the fact that when you look at stuff like the entire Ivalice Alliance franchise - Japanese audio in such a heavy Medieval European setting - is pretty far out there. Same goes for pretty much anything involving heavy norse mythology (ab)use and squeeling wapaneese school girls.


Dubs aren't of course always good, nor necessary, but there are often so that the original authors/designers/writers/creators have made some horribly stupid decisions that are entirely rooted in a similar kind of marketing as putting Leona Lewis in the international version of FFXIII is.

I was actually kinda saddened by the fact that the PSP remake of Star Ocean actually went with the stupidity of Japanese audio in the Japanese version, all the way, especially after how the SFC version did such a nice thing as having a full English intro (subtitled in Japanese) - clearly establishing the fact that "IN THE SPACE AGE - PEOPLE SPEAK ENGLISH AS THE (INTER)GALACTIC LANGUAGE"

Agree. Pre-rendered movies were a curiosity and a selling point at one point in time, but now we're approaching a time when they really should consider retirement

We have yet to learn how large the game will be and how evt. any disc change points will be handled in the game (story progress vs world travel). Either way, doing dual-audio, space wise, technically shouldn't be a problem. Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon, Eternal Sonata and many other games this gen has housed multiple languages (5, 3, 2 for the aforementioned titles. It's also worth mentioning that in Lost Odyssey there's actually so much unused space that the game could've fit on 3 DVDs, without cutting any of its content, but probably utilizes 4 just for design reasons, to allow the disc swaps to coincide with specific story events)


Anyway, in general, another of the mean beefs I have with dual-audio is;
It limits what you can do with the localized text, unless... you do a secondary set of subtitles/translations that bows down to the limitations of the original audio language. This is a tricky thing, 'cause it more or less ends up costing nearly as much (extra) as any additional language costs when localizing a title. There is a reason why not all DVDs have subtitles and dubtitles. Depending on how thorough the localization process is handled, you might also need to have multiple assets for graphics, animation, cutscenes, etc. when doing multi-lingual stuff too... and depending on how the game is put together and what you're in need of duplicates of, the size might jump up remarkably too.

 

Carnivol: don't get me started on the horned helmets, I already long ago made a thread about the horned helmet issue, when it comes to the Norse mythology.

 

PLENTY OF PEOPLE.

I am not one of them however.

 

Personally, I hate R&B. I am sure there are a lot of better music choices than this. Call me a weaboo, otaku, or whatever you want, but I prefer it when RPG's use their native songs in game. As its a JRPG, it(to me) adds to the experience and enjoyment I get out of them.

At least I don't own any of the newer consoles so I can skip FF XIII entirely.

 

I guess you have to distinguish between theme and aesthetic. Odin Sphere is ostensibly Nordic-themed but I'd challenge anyone to look at that game and say anything other than "Japanese".

I appreciate that, but making matters worse by jumping over to a shoddy dub seems like a curious solution. I mean, if the game is that fucked to begin with, what good is an English dub going to do over an English sub? I'm not being deliberately argumentative here, I'm honestly just trying to gauge what you're getting at.

So don't dub it in English in the first place. Problem solved.

Seriously, I appreciate what you're saying, but that doesn't change my position either way. I wouldn't watch an English dub of a foreign movie and wherever possible I apply the same principle to games.

(Exemption: trashy £1 kung-fu DVDs)

Please don't. Please. The last thing we need is another batshit WDK derailing. This has nothing to do with Denmark.

 

**Incoming huge amount of text. Whether it's considered OT or not is a subject of opinion**

But it doesn't prevent it from working perfectly fine, if not even better (to further promote its setting), if they went with a different language, one that is more true to the source material they so blatantly feast upon. I'd actually love to see Odin Sphere pulled off with something like Icelandic (unless they'd go another mile and getting everything done in even more correct Old Norse.)

The lack of thoroughly done cultural direction in games just shows how, like cereal, it's more of a consumer product than a piece of art (unless you count marketing as a valid art form one should embrace and appreciate for any other reason than economical self-profit.)

Fixing something that's broken? People often seem to have this misconception that a dub is by default "inferior" to its original counterpart and "shoddy." Okay, now I'm just gonna use the king of samples and the cheapest of them all too, but Kingdom Hearts - are you trying to tell me the English dub isn't in many/most ways better than the Japanese audio track?

Or what about games like Dragon Quest VIII, where the Japanese didn't even have audio and the international versions features voice acting. Should said Voice Acting just be thrown out the window, 'cause it wasn't there to begin with? What about those games where re-releases gets added content? Or what about those cases where the original writers/team are heavily involved in the localization process? Take Tales of Destiny (PS1 version, not PS2), where the US release more or less establishes plenty of new terminology that apparently wasn't present in the Japanese version, but which some of plays important roles in (and thus got integrated into) the Asia only sequel for the PS2.

And for the sake of other samples too, let's look at Metal Gear Solid, which is more or less done with English audio as the primary language (while still keeping a top notch Japanese audio track, featuring none other than Akio Otsuka as Snake). MistWalker/Feel+'s Lost Odyssey was also made this way. As is various horror/movie-inspired games like Capcom's Resident Evil, Konami's Silent Hill and the games by Deep Space/Access Games (of course, the acting in those samples are of various quality, but if they'd been done with Japanese audio... they'd certainly not felt right, even if there are huge amounts of Japanese influence gushing out of those too if you spend a few moments looking at them)

**I'll return to the "dub vs orig." subject further down**

You do realize that in some cases the options are Mute Audio or *insert dub* when you localize a title, right? As if the Japanese weren't already bad enough to make their games in a localization friendly way, they also often fail at making deals that properly covers international use of the voice acting in their games.

However, of course, target audience is also often to blame for the original audio getting kicked out of almost anything and everything. There are some countries that more or less have some sort of hatred towards foreign influence, hate everything involving learning something and probably feel it's a violation of their rights as a human being to not get something delivered in their native tongue. So either you dub something or you should axe the expected sales to be #/10 of what they'd be with a dub.

Movies is usually a whole different league, but then again, there are movies that have had tremendously great dubs. Even to the point where I'd say the dub is by far superior to the original. There's probably some hate monger out there now that pukes up his dinner as I say I much prefer Robotech to Macross (of course, Robotech is "more than just Macross").

Or how about some western movies that gets dubbed in other languages? Sure, I don't think it's fair to bring in those countries that dub anything and everything, but let's say... I actually like to bring up Ice Age. To be honest, I didn't find that movie very funny, but holy crap... the Norwegian dub for it was pretty excellent in my opinion. Same goes for some of the Disney and Cartoon Network stuff too. In some cases, I much prefer the local dubs to the original audio (and I sometimes prefer the Nordic dubs to the English dubs that're based on Japanese source content too, even if the Nordic dub utilized the English as an intermediate language).

The overall quality is sometimes better, the puns/wordplay/jokes are often better, the characters sometimes have more "character", delivery of lines is sometimes better, etc... But even so, I could never dream of watching something "so Japanese" as Azumanga Daioh in English (but I've heard okay things about the English dub, and it's one of those titles I hope to one day find on my own workbench.)

Anyway, one thing that tends to apply to a lot of dubbed content is that live action stuff really shouldn't be dubbed and the subtitling approach should partially be making up for that (where applicable). While in animation, it depends on the availability of dubs whether or not the subtitles should be direct or playful with the source material. A lot of stuff aimed towards children gets dubbed here, but if it also has any form for appeal to an older audience, they usually also have it available in its original language.


Also, I believe a lot of people who embrace everything Japanese either are or have great respect for a certain type of fansubbers. That group of fansubbers should never be allowed to touch anything commercial... Why? Because then you get stuff like some of NISA's recent efforts, which has fortunately even made a lot of so called Japanophiles twist and turn in great pain too. Speaking of Japanophiles - Undubs is a terrible thing. I sometimes find myself checking them out, but they more than just often makes me twist, turn and cringe in pain... mostly thanks to the fact that audio I'm hearing and the text I'm seeing present two different parallel worlds.


At the end of the day, it's all a big legal and marketing mess. But at the end of the day, the option to "do both" simply doesn't exist. I've worked on many projects where I've suggested there should be an option to mix and match audio and subtitles, but it's proven to be impossible thanks to the budget simply not having space for us to do so properly. (And, oh, just 'cause someone doesn't understand something doesn't make it better. It usually just means that it's even worse for those who do understand it.)

Localization is a mess. Mixed bag of marketing, economy, design and legal piss. In a lot of cases, it's also worth noting that the original developers (and their local publishers) are to blame for many of the issues found in the localization process (no matter which group you belong to)


Random stray thing that didn't really fit in anywhere, but kept rolling through my head; What about Legend of Mana's Swedish opening theme? (Or all those other background vocal tracks that randomly crosses over various language barriers?)