Mine is when 85% of a horror game's voice lines are the protagonist going SHIT or FUCK slightly under their breath every time something mildly spooky or intimidating happens, or when they discover some new obstacle
These days most games try to make hints like that sound as non-gamey as they can. In ye olden times supporting characters would just call Solid Snake and tell him to push the ACTION BUTTON to do various things
My favorite is in Pikmin, where Olimar just says "I have an overwhelming urge to approach and press the A button"
I love it when they make a joke out of it
"Imagine something... R buttonish."
I do like that version. "Got a strange message the other day, it said 'Open the map by pressing Start.' Any idea what it could mean?"
Psycho Mantis breaking the 4th wall is still up there.
BING BING WAHOO YES HAHA OH YEAH BOING YA WAH YAHOO!
I also love all the Mario character's habit of saying their own name for no reason
It will be a sad day when Charles Martinet dies/retires
This one's super specific but:
The dialogue from Ghost Recon Wildlands. The whole game is the most chud shit imaginable (you're a group of unrestricted spec-ops soldiers working with the DEA to invade Bolivia, extrajudicially murder people, and generally cause awful carnage and several actual war crimes including kidnapping a woman to blackmail her husband and condemning an innocent man and his entire family to death by angry cartel because he told you he fears the cartels more than you and refused to work with you), naturally, it's Tom Clancey shit. But the thing that drove me up the fucking wall with it and turned it from awful chud shit to outright insulting is how, despite being in Bolivia, your characters speak with almost insultingly bad Spanish pronunciation that makes it feel like mockery.
Nothing says "trying to be low-key and fit in while we "liberate" people" like thanking your contact with a hearty "Grassy-ass".
Oh yeah, wild lands. You’d think the things your squad do is chud enough but the game had to emphasize the chudness by throwing the ultrachud Bowman at you. I skip every cutscene with her in it.
Also the developer thought it’s funny to add “Shit balls!” as one of the random lines when you get shot, but it just reminds me of :PIGPOOPBALLS:
When my character is an idiot for no reason.
I'm fine if it's a choice to say it, or if it's there to let players who don't know or forgot to catch up again. In New Vegas the whole town of Goodsprings is basically a town to ask dumb questions in. But that's fair for first-time players or those who don't know any of the previous Fallout games. And you're not punished for not asking these questions again because New Vegas is well designed.
When it's laid out like:
- What's a bird?
- Goodbye
Then it's annoying as hell. Elder Scrolls Online is awful for this. My Dark Elf character was literally forced to say "Who would want to worship the Daedra?". YOU, DUMBASS. YOUR WHOLE-ASS RACE WORSHIPPED THEM FOR YEARS! Is it really that difficult to write two lines of unvoiced dialogue? You don't even have to change the voiced dialogue, just make it vague enough to pass for any of the potential responses.
I get that RPG writing is hard because of potentially infinite backstories you might give a PC, but could you maybe account for players who have a character that worships Daedra? Something that entire populations within your game world do?
Poorly written player character dialogue will often give you three ways to talk to people and it's always goody-good know it all, naïve confused idiot, and smug angry idiot. All the Mass Effect games do this.
And you can't express a polite refusal. It's just some bridge-burning one-liner when it's just I don't want to start this quest right now.
I wouldn't mind it if it was consistent.
Paragon mostly stays Paragon but Renegade goes Humans First -> The Bad Cop -> Genocidal Space Warlord in the span of the three games.
Paragon was obviously made first then renegade does whatever the writers felt like at the time.
I honestly don't remember it being too bad in Skyrim. There are moments when you come across as weirdly naive or making a dumb observation, but I seem to remember being able to skip some of the expository stuff.
Maybe I should replay it a bit and jog my memory though. It's been a few years now.
What I wouldn't give for the Morrowind dialogue interface to just be real life.
Random passersby become encyclopedias full of local knowledge and customs. Have them endlessly repeat something if you forgot about it. Topics they want to talk about are actually highlighted. Wow, what a world.
Witcher 3 is pretty good about this. Geralt is actually smart and doesn't sound like an idiot when talking to people.
Yeah, but that's mostly because he's a pre-established character. The less defined the player character, the more likely you're going to end up writing bad dialogue for them.
They also probably learned a lesson from the first Witcher game, where I remember a lot of the dialogue is "I have amnesia".
My character has to be a blank slate with no personality so I can impose my own onto them, because I TOO am a blank slate with no personality
Cutscenes that show your character doing things they can't do in game play are also infuriating.
Watching my dude vault over a low wall in a cutscene when he can't even overcome a 10cm ledge in game play pisses me off so much.
Saying "Kai Leng" seems to provoke the angriest reaction from literally anyone who's play Mass Effect lol
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP
My Garrus solo'd his ass on Insanity and the game just goes "Hahahaha lol no."
The scenery on Thessia is amazing, but fuck me if that scene isn't a lowpoint of the series. That and the dipshit kid you're forced to feel for are just the worst thing in Mass Effect.
That fucker!
I know this is an unpopular opinion but, the original end of mass effect 3 wasn't that bad when compared to like every time Kai Leng shows up. I just wish there was a way to banish him back to whatever anime that katana fucker was shat out of.
SHAUN!!
i genuinely love any oppertunity to press X to shaun/jason/mario/whatever. it can get fucking ridiculous and i love it.
Bethesda's weird obsession with random NPCs delivering expository dialogue, usually about themselves, whenever they get too close to you. In Skyrim and Fallout 4 this is extra bad since time isn't frozen when you're in the crafting stations, so if an NPC wanders enough to one while you're there they stand there running through 2 or 3 lines nonstop, one of which is usually them saying something to the effect of "I'm busy, leave me alone"
I see someone walking in my direction on the sidewalk and when I get within 10 feet I come to a complete stop then turn to face them. I say "Most people think Jim from HR deserves that promotion more than me, but Mr. Stevens knows I'd be a better manager than Jim" as they continue to walk away not even looking at me, while I turn to constantly be looking at them. After five seconds of standing there in silence I do an exaggerated turn and continue walking. I bump into a discarded soda bottle and the physics break, I get flung 400 feet into the air but luckily when I fall back down I don't die because I'm invincible, since the other person has a quest they can do where they get told to kill me.
I hate when characters use gameplay vocabulary unless the whole game leans on it. The colonel in Metal Gear telling me I need to press the action button is fine. That one guy in the antlion tunnel in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 who tells me there's a corner of the room full of "health and ammo" just sounds lazy.
The thing I probably hate the most is characters leaving notes behind unless there's a very specific, good reason for it. Something like:
"Hey, I just found this cabin in the woods. There's a bunch of monsters outside and I'm scared. Anyway the code for the safe is 0451. I left some shotgun ammo in there."
Just terrible. Hate it so much. Pulls me out of any game where it's present. What's even worse is audio logs. The only games I can think of off-hand that had a clear explanation of why the audio logs exist are Soma and Dead Space, where in both instances they're like an airplane's black box built into cyborgs and you listen to the last thing it recorded. Yeah that's reasonable.
Also yes I know they exist for expository reasons. I just want the exposition to not seem so game-like. Notes that exist where they don't make sense might as well be a popup from the game dev saying "Hey player, I'm the dev. This is the story stuff that happened."
The only games I can think of off-hand that had a clear explanation of why the audio logs exist are Soma and Dead Space
I think Bioshock counts at least for some characters as they are generally grandstanding assholes who totally would just monolog onto an audio log.
That then falls apart at the question of why the hell they're all strewn around the city
There's that one part in the geothermal plant where a bunch of Andrew Ryan's enemies have been killed and speared to the walls like a trophy room. A few of them have audio logs on them where they talk about how they're gonna overthrow Ryan.
I thought that was pretty effective.
Jesus christ it's $25 on steam. I really need to figure out how to pirate stuff again
It seems to currently be about 9 bucks or your local equivalent on GOG.
Before I watched this I had no idea what deadly premonition was about and the video only left me more confused
You walk up to a phone. The game invites you to press A. "It's a phone," says a forgettable voice.
Just like in writing, I really want reaction/explanatory spoken dialogue to flesh out a character. It should drive the plot or help you understand them better, not just pad out a voice actor's script length.
I literally could not describe Control's main character despite how much she talks about her environment and goals. She never says anything about herself in the way she speaks. I remember the game itself vividly, but she is literally devoid of a personality and her voice acting is too.
Life is Strange did a good enough job fleshing out Max's character in her inner monologue. She didn't just describe what she was looking at, she explained how it made her feel or why it mattered to her.
Life is Strange did a good enough job fleshing out Max’s character in her inner monologue. She didn’t just describe what she was looking at, she explained how it made her feel or why it mattered to her.
Kind of a classic adventure game trope, no? Manny Calavera had quips for every inventory item, piece of scenery and character in Grim Fandango.
Oh yeah LiS didn't invent that idea, it's just the only game I've personally played that does it well.
God, Control is such a shoddily designed game in like everything except the world itself, which is absolutely top notch even if half of it kinda is just SCP.
The jumping around and "flying" felt more fluid and useful in combat than I thought they would.
And yeah the setting itself is great. Dr. Darling and the Director both grew on me somehow.
The only solid writing is your phone calls with The Board. There's so much hidden meaning in the way they speak in synonyms, because you learn what two ideas they consider synonymous.
< We Apologize/Deny All Knowledge >
< It builds a Competition/Not Us >
< when possible/inevitable >
< about the Former's lies/ads >
< If you leave you will be sorry/dead and you will never work/exist in this Torn/Cosmic Reality again >
Tbh it feels like the game is cursed by being a shooter game, like the gameplay portion itself and the world feel disconnected from each other since almost all the enemies are just fucked up looking humans. If it was a straight up horror game without significant fighting involved theres unimaginable possibilities for using the cool shit in the worldbuilding.
Whatever the hell they were doing in Resident Evil 1 on the playsation, Japanese devs thinking american swat team members talked about Jill sandwiches and being the master of unlocking.
RE1 dialogue is just insanely good, but of course for the wrong reasons.
"JUST A MOMENT! I FOUND SOMETHING.. IT'S A WEAPON, IT'S REALLY POWERFUL.. ESPECIALLY AGAINST LIVING THINGS!" Hands you grenade launcher rounds
Aight Barry...
Also the game is full of that shit, like when they first get into the Mansion and hear a gunshot, someone says "What is it?", HUH? Are you a member of a SWAT team and can't distinguish a gunshot?!
Barry saying "Back off Jill, he's insane!" and blasting an individual with a handcannon until his head pops is the most am*rican cop thing ever. I just can't believe, oh I perceive this guy as "insane", let me blow his fucking brains out.
Every line in that game could be a meme
"But just TAKEALOOKATTHIS! It's Forrest! Ooohhhhh myyy gawwwd! ... I'm going to find out what caused Forrest's death... It looks like he was killed by a crow or something"
Chef's kiss
NO! Don't go!
Barry: What is this?
Wesker: Wow! What a mansion!
Special forces right there...
Amazing. Even Chris' campaign gets plenty of them, there's a bit where he earnestly declares "Let me be the nice guy for a change" that was so unexpected it made me do a legit spit take
There must be a back door somewhere!
Also the whole scene where Barry rescues Jill from Plant 42, that for some reason he's using a flamethrower (How convenient!), is just pure gold, pure pure gold.
Oh and few, if any, can beat Resident Evil Survivor's INSANELY GOOD LINE
"Vincent, it's me, your mother!" "My MOTHER?" "Vincent, please, listen to your mother.."
It's pure genius, brilliant, coupled with the "all over the place" music. Masterpiece.
Also the whole scene where Barry rescues Jill from Plant 42, that for some reason he’s using a flamethrower (How convenient!), is just pure gold, pure pure gold.
It's so good, he sees a 25 foot tall triffid and just yells "What the hell is this!?" like a dad trying to play it cool when there's a giant moth in the house or something.
Fuck I gotta play that game again lmao.
I always wonder what's going on through the minds of the poor voice actors reading those lines. I like to imagine exacting Japanese directors telling them to stick to the script
Going to say they probably didn't care much as they were happy to get work as americans in Japan and video games back then were still seen as a niche nerd hobby so they probably thought it was par for the course. There's a debate with Silent Hill 2 if the weird jilted dialogue is on purpose or like re 1, Japanese devs thinking americans sound like that.
There’s a debate with Silent Hill 2 if the weird jilted dialogue is on purpose or like re 1, Japanese devs thinking americans sound like that.
You had non-professional American actors being directed by Japanese directors, so both
Yeah I think it's probably both too. The HD collection tried adding in a new voice over with PROFESSIONAL va's and it came off stale. The weird jilted voice acting added to the feeling of alienation and isolation that was throughout 2.
I find it interesting that many Japanese games in the PS1 and PS2 eras, especially action or horror titles, only had an English dub that was produced under the Japanese devs' direct supervision. While saving money was probably a factor, it was also to make games set in America and often emulating American movies feel more authentic.
The big exception here is Metal Gear Solid- Hideo Kojima seems to have never given too much of a shit about the English localisation, as shown by the ease by which he threw David fucking Hayter under the bus the moment he could replace him with TV Actor Man
Revisiting old games I've discovered they have a ton of random Canucks
In old RPGs when you got to name a character and someone had to have forgotten their name. So the game would start with like your mother waking you up and going ”Your sister is waiting for you downstairs... What’s her name again?” ... ”That’s right! PIG FUCK is waiting downstairs!”.
I like when the protagonist keeps saying "I'M HERE TO KILL CHAOS" and "I MUST KILL CHAOS"
I was crying laughing at that trailer. I'm definitely gonna play the shit out of that game, though it bothers me that Garland had a medieval aesthetic while the protagonists had a Nomura aesthetic - I hope they explain that with time travel.
I'm excited to find out if he will kill chaos
Garland looked kinda like all his other appearances, I wouldn't be surprised if they just ignore the aesthetic clash
