| Scoobes said: I think there is one thing everyone is forgetting to take into account and that's the power of imagination as a storytelling tool in the genre. In the NES/SNES and to a lesser extent the PS1 days, the graphics and tech were sub-par and people could use their imagination to fill in gaps in graphical power and artwork.It can personalise the story experience in ways not possible now. Take voice acting for example. I used to imagine all the voices in my JRPGs and have an idea in my head of how everyone should sound. Now, any cliched voice acting winds me up. The character sprites would give me a basis upon which I could imagine the main character looking. With technology and graphics as advanced as it is now, cliches and cultural differences are a lot more noticeable. Imagine if FF7 had voice acting; Yuffie would probably be very annoying. Obviously, other genres haven't escaped this problem, but I think it's a lot more telling in JRPGs which have traditionally relied on good storytelling. |
This.
JRPGs also suffer from having cute characters with high pitched voices. Japanese seem to be better at making cute sounding character voices than the West. Also, a lot of the voice acting in JRPGs is quite terrible. It probably doesn't help that the dialogue in them tends to be poorly written or translated. Bad dialog can really destroy voice acting from being any good. Look at the Star Wars prequel trilogy. The actor playing Anakin Skywalker is criticized for being wooden. That's because of the dialog he is given. It's a known fact that George Lucas is terrible at writing dialogue(especially romance). In fact, many of the actors from the original Star Wars trilogy actually told Lucas how bad his dialog was. A lot of the dialog heard in the original trilogy was improvised by the actors.
