Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - Unlimited Glitch Works
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malvarez1
Posts: 2132 |
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The whole Game Informer situation sucks, and the way the higher ups handled it was awful.
By comparison I’m not too mad at the Fate snafu. It didn’t last too long, and Lee to some fun content. The Dracula Dead by Daylight thing is actually pretty cool. I’d play as him if I played the game. |
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FishLion
 Posts: 256 |
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I really appreciate the Denpasoft coverage, we really don't need payment processors of all people controlling what media is able to be monetized. I also appreciate you highlighting the anti-queer part of trying to demonetize content since it is often labeled as adult. While much less serious, things like youtubers waiting to say curse words so their videos can get ads is silly as well. If people want to monetize the internet they need to understand that the internet has a lot of different norms and accepted content at different places and you can't monetize everything on the internet according to one set of rules and norms.
I played the heck out of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, there is so much depth to that game that I never would have expected at the beginning, very fun. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6330 |
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I don’t think that it’s that they can’t but won’t. It was probably in hindsight never a good idea to make a Castlevania game that referenced a major incident as background. |
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That Little Rapscallion
Posts: 61 |
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I've played FF14 in Japanese since 2.0 so all the discussion around bad voice acting doesn't really concern me but I'll concede it's a bit silly to complain about it now given the game has always had wildly differently English VA direction and changes in localization compared to the original or other languages. I never really cared for any of the English voices given how different they portray the characters and the reliance on heavy accents and Olde Shakespear dialog. The backlash to Wuk Lamat isn't really limited to the English community since the Japanese community doesn't care for her either given all the comments and Japanese popularity polls I've seen so it probably not really about the voice at the end of the day but I guess it's more contentious in the English community if you also have to deal with bad voice acting in addition to bad writing. I'm curious to see how the story will go out in future patches given the reception overall and how the dev team usually adjusts to it. Sidenote: The Jotaro reference is a bit fitting given Daisuke Ono voices a major character in the new MSQ and was one of the few highlights for me. Although even his character isn't that great either.
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2491 Location: United States |
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Oh wow. I know nothing of Final Fantasy 14 as I don't really care for MMORPGs, but good lord, Sena absolutely does NOT deserve all the harassment she's been getting. Whether you like the character she plays or not, there is NEVER an excuse to harass someone like that. Like, where do these people get off sending rape/death threats to a voice actor and threatening to dox them just because they happen to be trans? The blatant transphobia is just so disgusting it's not even funny. Oh, and Sena actually has some VA experience, she played one of the leads in Inu-Oh for Pete's sake, and a prominent character in Unicorn Overlord! Just...would it kill these people not to be idiots and just go on with their lives and not start drama for funsies???
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 558 Location: PA / USA |
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I would add that FFXIV is probably not one of the games I would hold up for having a really good/tight script translation - things have gotten a little bit better over the years, but their localisation team has really dropped the ball time & again, and it's one of the big reasons I've stuck to the JP audio track the entire time. It's a very fun world & story, but not in English as much as it is in Japanese.
The community backlash thing is odd - the game has an open marriage system and every day more & more items/clothing aren't gender-locked. It's not uncommon to see some really unexpected character combinations while traveling around. I wonder how much of the actual playerbase are the ones complaining or if it's the handful of fair-weather streamers' audiences that are jumping on the story and causing problems. On that note, if anyone has never tried it before, a good 100 hours of Final Fantasy XIV is free to play, you just cant trade items (most are character-locked anyways) and other people have to invite you to a party, you cant be the party's creator. Your MMO character shifting to a mentor role is actually something they did for the final expansion of Final Fantasy XI back in the day, Phantasy Star Universe as well. After traversing the world/universe and saving everyone multiple times, both games seemed to reason that the only direction for your character to take was to pass their knowledge and skill on to the next generation - the FF11 character you mentor even shows up in a brief spot if the particular event is running. It was really fun in Phantasy Star at the time because Lumia Waber was a bit of an Ahsoka Tano-style bratty annoyance that through various interactions became one of the series' cooler characters if you stuck with her. Especially in Japanese RPGs, it doesn't seem like it's an uncommon turn for the main player's narrative to take, so it's interesting FFXIV is having turmoil over it. Lastly, banks shouldn't be able to govern what you can and cannot play/buy. Between that story and GameInformer going down, I really do get this creeping sense that we're hurtling towards a future here where old websites and games are made purposely unplayable so that your only option is to invest in a company's newest Ai-made website or service. One of these days, even ANN is going to go down too and/or fold into IGN. I have absolutely no doubts that Ai-generated content & social media is just going to self-consume until it gets ripped apart by its own internal forces and unrelenting greed. |
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OpenYourEels4TheNextFeels
Posts: 140 |
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There is also the downside that you cannot play as Hrothgals or Bunny Girls/Bunny Boys for free, because all of those character options were added in expansions after the current cut-off point for the free-to-play content. But given that they recently added the Stormblood expansion to the free trial, we will probably eventually see all of the character options added to the free version (though it may take like 5-7 years). |
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yeehaw
 Posts: 579 |
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Don't worry I got you- It's basically a standard grail war but done tournament style. Also it's set on the moon. The moon is a computer. |
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Fluwm
 Posts: 1052 |
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Echoes of Wisdom seems to be shaping up to be a far more expansive game than one would expect. The horse riding, alone, would seem to indicate it's a big world that'll take time to traverse (possibly explaining why so much of the space around Hyrule Castle Town looks the same (it's all forest). The quest log and all of the NPCs they showed off on the website (we've got the King, of course, but also civilian and military officials, and two sheikah) also indicate a lot more content.
It sure will be nice to get a top-down Zelda game that takes more than 8 or so hours to completely clear out. |
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Nigel Planter
Posts: 110 Location: London, UK |
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This is a No True Scotsman fallacy where anything you don't like in a community is dumped off on people that can be dismissed as a perceived outside group and not the true XIV community. It's probably worth remembering the only visible instance of crossdressing in XIV canon is in the Hildebrand questlines when he dresses as a woman a couple times to trick people ala Bugs Bunny and gets called a "cross-dressing deviant/pervert" in English/Japanese. It's not really the most flattering depiction. And there's zero gay characters in the game. XIV has been heavily criticized by western game journalists and outlets for it's (lack of) gay characters, non-fair skinned main character, and other issues that have been found to be problematic. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
Posts: 558 Location: PA / USA |
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One of the things that older FF11 had an issue with was players hazing other players over their gear, and there was a lot of competitive intensity and group fighting over rare enemy spawns & stealing. You could not progress the story without hitting some of these spawns, so things could get a bit toxic. I speculate, as someone who stuck around for close to a decade, that most of this stemmed from the demanding scheduling of a lot of these activities. If you have only so many hours between school and work to log on and get something that was integral to your character, there's some pretty intense FOMO if you're not around to grab it and someone else does first. Worse still, if you failed you've wasted not just your time, but your group's time AND risked everyone leveling down and losing the ability to equip their current gear. That anxiety pushed a lot of players to have some pretty unhealthy playing habits and social perspectives over the game's lifetime. Yoshida is often quoted as saying that he wants people to participate in FF14 in their own way and enjoy other games in their downtime. I cannot personally speak to non-English Data Centers, but most of the social anxiety and player hazing stuff only pops up if you're trying to world-first a cutting-edge new boss, or you're specifically joining a boss-raiding group that's trying to farm the latest content. By personal measurement over the last 10 years, the FF14 experience has been infinitely more lighthearted than FF11 ever was due to the sheer variety of things that you are able to participate in. Your are not particularly beholden to other people to progress the main story, and the game has various systems built in that FF11 was missing to be able to organise events, groups, and community meetings. It's near-impossible to pass by someone that doesn't have a mention about being LGBT+ in their character description (whether or not they're getting whispered & harassed I cant say, but in 10 years I've not heard of it or had anyone weird make trouble). There are many companies, player events, roleplaying venues, and social groups geared towards varying spectrum of identity and interest, and being reasonably social myself, it's been 10 years of nothing but positive experiences. FF14 as a game is built pretty differently from the way that most live services try to pressure you with FOMO to keep consuming it like a drug. It's generated a remarkably different tone amongst players than FF11 had. Every now and again, an expac will launch or some media coverage will happen where an influx of players from a different failed game tries FF14 out or a streamer gives it a try. Suddenly a ton of new people show up to play with them specifically, rather than simply exist in the game world (they usually either buy a skip and go directly to the newest boss-raid stuff, or get bored of the reading and troll or drop out soon after). Again, after 10 years of it, it's remained a markedly different experience than any other MMO/social/online game and this is additionally while remembering what seeing the same user handles on an Unreal or Quake server would be like back in the day. So again, with respect to the fact that I cannot be on all Data Centers and watching every conversation happening online, it legitimately shocks me to hear that a game that has fostered a pretty solid playerbase of enjoyable people would be aiming targeted harassment at someone for specifically being out publicly as transgender. At the same time, there's a loud bunch of folks that see R&G holding hands in official art and would probably argue to the death they're not coded as lesbians because some other character or even their own is a better "one true pair", though I mainly blame SE for not being more explicit & direct about it when said art was originally released. It's not just a simple matter of there being No True Scotsman, there's a long decade of oration, merging of servers and communities, reputations of certain locations or Data Centers, and marked moments in FFXIV's history (especially when compared in its difference to FF11) that would take more than a random forum post to paint a picture of what 10 years of existing socially in Eorzea has been like. I hope whoever is bothering Sena filters out of the playerbase sooner than later - the game is literally not built to promote that sort of disunity, and I hope it pushes Yoshida/SE to take a second pass at that Dawntrail character if the issue at hand is actually one of poor writing, while taking more care to do what Guilty Gear did with Bridget and not be afraid to give a hard confirm to anything going on with characters like R&G. |
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Troyen
Posts: 26 |
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The English side more often than not suffers from poor voice directing. ARR English wasn't great, but I don't think that's because of the actors - many of whom deliver competent performances in other projects (including other video games). When characters can't pronounce names correctly or deliver emotion and timing for a scene, that suggests the VAs were provided no context to the script they were asked to deliver. When they swapped the English dub to the UK studio in Heavensward, the quality of the dub improved immensely, and has generally been good (aside from the occasional one-off meme line) since. In Dawntrail, it seems like there was a voice direction regression again. Not quite to the ARR level, but numerous characters suddenly had issues they hadn't had before. Krile couldn't decide whether she was 20 or 40. Alisaie couldn't pronounce names immediately after Erenville explained them to her. G'raha had one scene where I'm not sure they told him what his character was actually doing. There were some issues with sound balance. And so forth. It was very uneven, in a way we haven't seen since the patch everyone had to record at home during covid lockdowns. Unfortunately for Sena, her character is the focus of 90% of the expansion (which has 21 hours of cutscenes), and in particular she appears at a key climactic moment in the story and the lines that were delivered just do not match the emotion of the scene. I don't think that she as an actor was incapable of delivering a good performance there, because there's a very similar scene a few levels prior that required a similar mix of emotions and she nailed that one. I think it's more likely someone neglected to tell her any context at all around the climactic scene (like the fact she's in a battle there) and so one of the big spotlight moments has an awful line read and people are memeing on that. But your average gamer doesn't really understand the difference between voice acting and voice directing (and may not even know what a voice director does). Hopefully they'll let her rerecord those two lines during post-patch recording, like how they rerecorded a couple scion lines that didn't fit in Endwalker. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
Posts: 558 Location: PA / USA |
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Agreed, is a pretty good rundown of things. Krile and Alisaie have been some pretty big misfires in English compared to their JP performances, not really by any fault of the cast themselves but just by how differently they wind up being perceived between the two languages. The difference really sucks any time I have the displeasure of hearing the English audio on a video. I don't think a lot of newer players are aware, but the FFXIV dev team actually went back and not only recently pruned but even retooled some entire new sequences for older ARR story segments. These were some of the oldest spots in the game where pacing was a slog or a party size requirement made it hard to assemble enough help to earn a completion. The game has made some pretty big advancements to its combat direction over the years, and sneaking some of those features in early now, allow newer players to both enjoy the story at a more even clip and learn some important mechanics for later group encounters. In the past, when there has in fact been legitimate/constructive criticism of a misstep or content that has fallen short, Yoshida has usually done well to make a statement and course-correct things in a relatively timely fashion. It set a standard that while there have definitely been disagreements in the playerbase as to how some classes function or various other things, there's never really been any massive world-ending controversies like you sometimes catch at other studios. Usually. |
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2397 |
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Do you mean Bazett Fraga McRemitz? Because Kirei's a pivotal character in Fate/Stay Night and better described as a Church Executor. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 650 |
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Worse, I meant Karen Hortensia. Like I said, I only have surface-level understanding of Fate, and Ataraxia is one of my major blind-spots in the series (everything I know about Ataraxia, I learned from reading gag-manga about it over a decade ago).  Thanks for pointing it out for me, and thanks for your patience; goodness knows I'm already bad enough with names as it is. The article has been edited to fix this mistake.
It's also my understanding that moderation in FF14 is very strict and there is very little tolerance for harassing players or the like. There will always be sweaty players in an MMO and there is a stereotype of a lot of Mentors being holier-than-thou, but it's also been my experience that you can do really, really badly in a raid and might even be holding the team back but folks won't call you out for it. Whereas, WoW has... the reputation it has, and not undeservedly so. I have seen some longtime FF14 folks regurgitating negativity about Bryer's performances, mind. They should know better, but again: Dawntrail is a very anticipated new expansion and a transitional period for FF14. Folks don't know what to do with that. Also: someone pointed out how much the FF14 team goes back to make old ARR content "feel" better for newer players; this is also contrasted with WoW, and not for the better in WoW's case. Apparently, there are whole levels and dungeons you just can't do in WoW anymore; there's hardly any maintenance for old content. I swear, everything I hear about that game sounds like a toxic relationship and a half... |
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