I'm playing Dragon Quest XI for the first time on my Switch and this is one of the first things you see when you enter the city, a band of playfull looking characters yet no actual music is coming from them. Its probably my biggest pet peeve in big games, ESPECIALLY an RPG/JRPG when you're expecting to be immersed in another world. Pokemon Sword/Shield did this too but even worse make it a cutscene with only subtitles, no voice acting and is probably the most annoying example I can think of.
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I’ve never found JRPGs to be very immersive.
A number of JRPG companies don’t do full voice acting, even today, replacing around 70% of the lines in the game with either silence or a sound effect from the character or a quick bark over the text. The Dragon Quest series has always been really bad in this regard; the first game to have any voice acting was 8, in 2004, and it pretty much only had it for directly story relevant cutscenes – and even some of those had the ‘print text, send sound bark’ dominating them. And the voice acting was only in the NA release.
9 had none.
Expecting more from the Dragon Quest series is, by this point, a failed endeavor. They prefer to keep Dragon Quest in its classic style – no to little voice acting. It’s a design choice, and one most people are going to disagree with in this day and age.
(That said, of contemporaries to 8, they have a point – try playing Rogue Galaxy and the *constant barrage of combat barks from your party members*.)
Pokemon S/S is so stupid. They animating the lips without voice. Just do a 2D art when talking like most JRPG do but i guess this would be more work lol
I was so hyped for the first arena with audience applauding and then the referee has no voice. What a let down.
as everyone else is saying its a known JRPG problem for longer/more openworld style games they tend to fill the world with fluff characters then do absolutely nothing with them like this other then subtitle what they COULD be saying since they don’t actually pay actors to speak any of these lines. This has been less of a problem over the years but it use to be a routine thing. My person pet peeve is when a MC HAS a voice but they still only give you text responses to their thoughts on things like in the old silent hill games (older game so I can excuse it)
That band’s manager is Colonel Tom Parker, the same dude who managed Elvis and had a strong grip on *all* things Elvis. If he carried these guys with the same power, then royalties Square would need to pay to have their music play would double the cost of production.
Money.
Portraying the *idea* of there being a band costs less money than actually paying for another song, syncing animation with it, and potentially localizing it in multiple different languages for international release.
Especially if the song or band is not meant to be important for the narrative experience.
When DQ11 first came out it only had a relatively low quality midi soundtrack, and didn’t even get voice acting until the English release.
It was going for deliberately retro (and also selling a higher quality orchestarted soundtrack on CD, but that’s the composer’s fault).
Let the world *sound* alive too.
Tbh no voice acting is not the biggest problem of pokemon series. They’re just not 60€ (now probably 70) games
That’s one of the reasons why I enjoy The Legend of Zelda, a series where music has always had a strong emphasis. Twilight Princess had a few bards in the castle town, Majora’s Mask had the dancing girls, Tears of the Kingdom had the Stable Trotters, and all of these performers have actual music you can hear when you approach them.
Zelda has always been more immersive than the typical Japanese fantasy game, and its focus on music is no small part of that.
nice
Just want to give Sea of Stars a quick shoutout. I loved the music but when I realized the band members started playing when their part of the music came up or stopped and just kept vibing when it was over got me really excited.
Also the mushrooms in Mushroom March starting to sing when the chorus hits.