And Then They Started Talking

I was playing The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard earlier last week and it got me thinking about spoken dialogue in video games.

Having grown up with the NES, there were very few games that had any kind of spoken dialogue, and I am not referring to the "uff" sound that Link made anytime he was hit.  In Top Gun: The Second Mission, a garbbly computery voice said "Take Off!" right as the game started.  Even in Star Fox, which came out four years later used "blrrbittyblrp" at various tones for the different characters; although in Star Fox 64, the sounds were replaced with spoken dialogue, which sounded fine.  Yes, even Slippy.  Specifically though in RPGs, spoken dialogue has been something that I had always preferred my games without the dialogue between characters spoken by real people. 

I recall first being annoyed by hearing dialogue spoken by characters back in 2006 while playing Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube. I think what bothered me about hearing Lloyd, Sheena, and company speaking was that I was not used to hearing so much spoken dialogue in RPGs.  (I'm singling out RPGs because I'd already been playing games like Resident Evil and Time Splitters 2, which only used spoken dialogue and that didn't seem out of place, possibly because of the genre of the game).  Tales played in an odd way that, the characters only spoke during cut scenes, the rest of the time, all of the dialogue and descriptions were text.  No, I lied.  I had gone into the settings and turned off the spoken dialogue option since I didn't like how the voice actors sounded with how I imagined they sounded in my head.  Then during the cutscenes, the characters always spoke, which is what I had found disjarring.  Maybe if I had listened throughout the game I would have been more used to the sound of their voices.  Or maybe the voice acting was just really bad?

I think it was mainly just a mental disconnect.  That these types of RPGs, in the past, would not have any spoken dialogue so when it was so prevalent in Tales, I had to turn off the voices because it felt like someone standing behind me reading the text because they wanted to hear the out loud.

I specifically recall thinking, "I played the Dragon Warrior [1 - 3] and Final Fantasy [NES, SNES, FFT] games without any spoken dialogue, I don't need that.  I bet that's there for kids these days who don't have the gumption to read the text themselves and who need everything read to them.  This is lame.  Mmmm yes, quite disingenuous my good fellow."  Then I walked away while sniffing my brandy and puffing away on a cuban see-gar.  It may not have transpired exactly as that, but it was pretty close.

Which now brings me to The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, where all of the dialogue is spoken and I am perfectly fine with it.  And in a similar comparison, the spoken text is up on the screen, so it is not a subtitle-type issue with not wanting both spoken word and text on the screen at the same time.  Never once during the two hours that I have put into ESA:Redguard have I thought that the spoken dialogue was out of place.  Actually, there was one female character who spoke with an annoyingly shrill voice (Maria, Marie, I cannot recall her name, but she was in Port Hunding near the Temple of Arkay).

So what is the point of my blabbering for today?  Apparently that either I've gotten used to the idea of dialogue in video games being spoken is now okay with me.  Or that it depends on the game, as opposed to the genre of the game.  I think it will remain on a game-by-game basis and all very much hindering on whether or not the voice acting in good enough to listen to for hours on end.  Because even the script and voice "acting" in Resident Evil (1996) was humorously bad in the best possible way.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I Reckon Something.