It’s cool. I like it. really stylish. Chie’s VA sucks donkey dong. The exposition is waaaaaaaaaaaay too long. I like that they don’t shoot themselves in the head here. I like being able to cuntrol my party. I still love the music. The way the game moves according the weather still confuses me some. I’ll get used to it.
How do the first two persona games play? Just in case I ever decide to track them down. is the PSP version a good representation of the original or am I better off finding the original?
No, get the PSP version of one. There is absolutely no reason to get the PSX version over the PSP one.
There are some slight criticisms, but the ability to play the Snow Queen quest far outweighs all of them combined (it makes up about half the game and the US PSX version lacked that entirely). Also the localization of that version is a lot more professional than the original (as in actually done by professionals at that point rather than knee jerking to everything and hamfisting an American setting in a clearly Japanese game, among other things).
That said there really isn’t anything connecting the first three games (P2 was divided into two different games but the US only got one of them) with the many versions of P3 or to P4.
What? Really? I can’t fathom disliking Chie’s voice, she’s awesome. Maybe you’re just not far enough yet. All the voices of P4 are miles ahead of P3’s, especially since P3’s voice cast is weighed down by the Albatross that is Fuuka’s VA, with one or two exceptions (it feels like the voicework in the animated cutscenes are worse than the in-game cutscenes, see: Yukiko’s ‘hot studs’ routine)
I played P4 before P3, so P4’s improvements had me spoiled and I enjoyed P3 far less than I probably would have if I played it first. Whereabouts are you in the game? There’s way too much exposition in the opening hours before you get to fight your first terrible mind monster.
At first I thought I would hate that main battle theme, but it quickly grew on me and now I can’t even get it out of my head. Even if I can’t make out what most of the lyrics are.
Having gameplay being fun and hard instead of just ball-crushingly hard and frustrating is a somewhat recent phenomenon in MegaTen games. P1 and P2 are both pretty horrifying grindfests, P3 already was a vast improvement and P4 even moreso. Playing P1 after P4 will be a good kick in the testicles.
And yeah, avoid the PSX version like the plague. It basically got the 4kids treatment back then.
Are you kidding? She overracts like crazy and sounds cartoonish. The Voice acting in P3 is so much better, except yes, for Fuuka. I still like the music in 3 a little more, but I like they took the same sound.
Fair enough. I mean overall, the V/A in P4 is pretty solid, really. I’ve heard worse, but so far (Going through Amagi’s castle now, so not so far), her’s is by far the worst. IMO.
P4 voice acting sounds kind of odd at first, but you can tell that after the first few scenes the VA become a lot more comfortable with their roles. The cast especially excels in the comedy scenes and at interaction as a whole.
Yeah, I’m thinking of the game as a whole. Yukiko’s castle is just the tip of the iceberg, the cast really hasn’t had time to settle in by that point. Honestly, I can’t even clearly remember the first months of gametime as I can the mid-to-endgame stuff so maybe she was a little worse at the start. I’ll pay close attention if/when I replay it. I just know that by the end of the game I really enjoyed her performance.
But as far as crazy off-the-wall performances goes, just wait until the NEXT dungeon.
I can already sense a stronger chemistry among the cast here vs. P3. It sounds weird that the cast would “settle in” to their roles by a certain point. That just doen’t sound professional.
Really DR? Persona 4’s a long game, there’s a lot of dialogue for each character to record. Assuming they start in chronological order you don’t think the voice actors would be more comfortable in their roles towards the end than they were at the beginning? I mean, they’re only human. And the production company certainly isn’t going to spend the money to re-record the lines.
Bahamut: The first one. Then the second one follows it. Yosuke didn’t have a dungeon outside of the first tutorial battles.
Well, look at the voice acting in say… MGS. Just looking at the original one, since they hadn’t already “settled in” to their roles. It has some of the best voice acting in a video game, period. Clearly they knew who they were voicing, and the situations, and the emotions they’d have to convey and how to convey them. They weren’t reading it, then all of a sudden just “got it.” I don’t buy that. It makes more sense that it was more of a budget issue, which could explain why so many games (most of them English dubs of japanese games) suffer from sub par voice acting. It could also explain her (Danielle Judovits) sub par voice acting, since looking at IMDB, she’s not exactly a novice.
I’ll have to take your word on MGS, I never played the series.
I don’t know, I find that it takes a bit of time for a lot of Voice Actors to find their legs in a series, it seems especially true in very ‘anime-like’ scenarios. MGS is really not, so maybe that’s why it feels better. Despite coming from a Japanese producer it is not at all very ‘anime’ in tone from what I know.
But in ‘japanese school’ scenarios especially I’ve found that it takes an episode or two (for a TV series’ sake, for a video game it would be the first 30-60 minutes of cutscene dialogue which would take it to about where you are now taking into account where Chie was introduced) to fit in, particularly when the series tries to keep it as authentic as possible by leaving in things like honorifics (which Persona does). Most of that actress’s other roles were in North American-based series where speaks like a North American. She’s more than just playing the role of Chie, here, she’s also trying to keep the pronunciation of terms straight in a script that has a much higher demand for them than is typical. That would throw anyone off for a little bit, until they got used to it.
The recent Persona games do not have a typical localization (and personally I’m not a huge fan of randomly leaving in japanese terms and honorifics with the excuse of it being ‘authentic’, because if was authentic they wouldn’t be speaking English in the first place but whatever), and that sort of thing does affect the performance of voice actors, so I don’t think it’s fair to stack it next to MGS just because it’s another video game without taking that into consideration.
Yeah, the original MGS is extremely western minded. It becomes less so as the series goes on. You have some valid points there that I didn’t think about. It’s also a matter of matching the Japanese VA’s representation of the character (Why many females voice their characters so high pitched) and stuff like that.
I like that they keep it as authentic as possible, but JRPGs are slightly more mainstream (or less niche anyway) than anime is, you would more non or casual anime fans picking them up and being confused by it. Im sure that happened since P3 became a relatively moderate success.