The Xenoblade Chronicles Series Thread: Definitive Edition (All Spoilers in Tags)

[Nuvendil]

bigtakilla said:

Nuvendil said:

Depends on how you define bad.  For me, it's worse when a line feels like it was read off the script with no knowledge of context and no effort than when a line is flubbed but at least they gave it a shot.  The former is very common in the lower level cutscenes in the first game.  Which is where most the issues in all three games lie, the lower tier cutscenes have a noticeably lower quality standard than the big production ones.  

Fair enough. But even as you have mentioned above, all three games have those scenes. Hell, most games have this problem to some degree.

Most games do but it's not so distracting or egregious. The issue with the Xenoblade games is the extremes.  Look at Skyrim for example.  This issue does exist there but it slips by unnoticed by most because the high points aren't that high and the low points aren't that low.  So yeah, quality descrepencies exist between the important and unimportant dialogue, but the difference is less.  With all 3 Xenoblades, you have this juxtaposition of really good performances with ones that are really wooden or stilted or riddled with odd pauses or devoid of proper inflection.  It's that extreme gap that's so distracting.  And this is fixable, it's just a matter of some more time and money being put in.  They aren't hiring bad actors, they just aren't taking the time to nail it down and not putting in themoney and effort to sync the lips to the dialogue rather than do it backwards.