#...Is that okay? The game filter thing? Writing about characters playing a videogame is a little hard to get right.

[asjjohnson]

Part 16 of my poll adventure fic. Links: the beginning, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15.

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Danny logged into Doomed, and found FRYERTUCK and CHAOS waiting for him.

Despite the online game's multiple upgrades, it still didn't have a way to permanently store player's progress, so they had to start over at level one each time they logged in.

"Hi guys, I'm here," Danny typed.

"Hi, GHOST BOY."

"Finally! Let's get started before you have to stay up all night again."

"Hey, I've been better about that lately."

The three of them ran into the level, entry-level weapons ready.

And then all three of them stopped to stare at the scene before them.

"Uh... who's that?" FRYERTUCK asked.

Up ahead, a player was in the air shooting at everything around him.

An axe-welding gatekeeper re-spawned in front of the player, but was quickly killed again. Then a building reformed, and the player shot at it, too.

As Danny got closer, the player's public chat box appeared on the screen.

"hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha—" GAME PHANTOM said.

...And continued to say.

Danny asked in his private chat, "What's his deal? Who would continuously type a wall of text while playing?"

"Someone having a lot of fun?" FRYERTUCK asked.

"And why is he sticking around, anyhow? The portal's right there," CHAOS added.

Like Sam said, the portal to the next level was already open, but GAME PHANTOM was ignoring it.

Danny switched to his public chat box. "Hey, are you new to this game? The goal is to go through the levels and gather the keys. That's the door to the next level beside you."

"—hahahaha." GAME PHANTOM turned to look at Danny. "I know. I'm just not interested."

Another player started to approach the portal.

GAME PHANTOM turned around and shot him, before turning back toward Danny.

"Did this guy just take over the role of gate guardian?" FRYERTUCK asked.

"Looks like it," Danny typed back.

If GAME PHANTOM held them up on level one, they wouldn't have enough time to get to the last level today. And Danny really didn't want to stay up all night again—and especially not force his friends stay up with him.

So what should he do about this?

---

“Alert me when there’s an update” list:

@charlietheepic7, @chrysanthemum9484, @mymadmedleyw, @dp-marvel94, @aikoiya, @whydouwantmyname, @cinturon-cadena, @freakofyournature, @satanicrutialspecialist, @danphantom80, @kaezer, @chipsyay, @mysterimax, @56thingsinaname, @derpxp, @potatoofweird

(if you want on the list, specifically ask to be alerted for updates in a tag or comment. Ask again if I forget to add you! If I can’t tag you, I’ll send a Message.)

[talenlee]

Story Pile: Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte

I, for one, would not recommend building a fantasy universe around characters surnamed Riefenstahl.

Spoiler Warning: I’m going to spoil a bunch of stuff from this anime.

Content Warning: I’m going to mention offhandedly some of the things in this series, but none of it is particularly worrisome. I’m just putting a content warning here because it’s a nice tryptich with the other.

Tone Warning: This anime sucks, and I’m going to say that. Like I just did. You might be upset by seeing me talk smack about it. I’m even going to compare it to the most obvious alternatives in its space, and you might be sick of that.

Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte is a light novel series that was then made into an anime, in the proud tradition of anime being made about cultural hallmarks that google well and somehow manages to convince me, a casual viewer, that the people making this show have never even looked at the thing they think they’re talking about. But wait I’m getting ahead of myself. Long Name I’m Not Typing Out Every Time tells the ‘thrilling’ ‘story’ of a novel idea where two people play a videogame together, and commentate on the game, and as they commentate on it, that commentary changes the story of the game. You may recognise this as like, Mystery Science Theatre or the long and well-considered history of Lets Play media that’s been uh, the bedrock of internet and comedy content for an entire generation of millenials.

But no, not like that.

No instead, Who Cares And Now What play Big Deal focuses on the idea that Endo, and Kobayashi, our protagonists, normal everyday Japanese students with mutual anxiety conditions (hey, is it possible the high school system in Japan is bad given all the really messed up kids they present as ‘everyman’ characters in the media) play a otome game called Love Me Magically! which is straight up the best name of anything in this entire bog. Endo has a crush on Koboyashi and Kobayashi wants to play the game with him, and they put together a plan for her to play it and he to commentate on it as part of the Broadcast Club at their school. This club is so important there’s an entire scene dedicated to them bailing on this entire enterprise in the name of getting Our Protagonists to wind up together and absolutely not do things like provide context or texture or demonstrate any relationship to the Broadcast Club.

Nope, they’re there to present the premise and get the hell out of the way, which is a good demonstration of all the other stuff in this anime. Because this anime’s framing device (a couple of human lets players with metatextual information engaging with the narrative of a game) is just there to present another premise and get the hell out of the way.

See, the idea here is that this game has a story that’s interesting because of how there’s this villain character that Girlbayashi wishes was involved in the plot differently, but don’t worry, we’re not going to see that, we’re not going to learn about the story of this game and then learn about how this player wishes it was different. No modding, no fanfiction, no Instead, ep 1, turns out that actually, these two can magically communicate with the universe inside this game.

Okay, that’s something, I suppose – are they then going to use the information they have out of the game to influence events in the game?

Nope!

They’re just going to tell the characters what they think should be done, and because they’re disembodied voices with access to actionable information they have no means to learn, they instead assert themselves as gods, and what follows is the most boring, tedious predictable playthrough of a otome game with exactly one, one single idea that I thought was fun or cool. The narrative that follows from this point has all the terrible depth of writing of a slushy Otome game, as filtered through a fictionalised version of some extremely bad streamers all wrapped up in the package of an anime that contributed to my ongoing thesis that 2023 was a year for terrible anime.

Alright, so this wasn’t fun, this wasn’t good to watch, but don’t worry at the end, they reveal that actually there’s a multiverse, there are ghosts from transcendental universes and this game, and just this game (as far as you know) is actually a window into another universe where we can do nothing but play with the pieces for our sport (hey, does this mean other videogames are like, moral evils to play because your actions can do things like enact war crimes or torture animals, weird, I wouldn’t introduce that idea into your narrative about videogames but maybe you don’t think about those things if you’ve never played a videogame), and therefore by getting over these youths’ individual emotional problems and exorcising the demons that are actually why they’re sad (kinda, but not really), they can wind up as a couple and then they finish the game and also banish an evil spirit.

This show sucked.

I had planned to talk about this anime because hey, I thought it’d be interesting to talk about different ways to talk about videogames or games and how they’re presented or fandom art as a creative experience or how we make paratextual readings of games and therefore create fandoms for underdeveloped characters, but the thing is, get this, this show is so bad that I don’t want to. I would respond to what this anime has to say about its subject matter but it doesn’t have anything to say about it.

Still, I did promise there was a thing in this anime that I liked, and here it is:

One of the characters has healing magic. She has power to be a great healer. In response to this, she proceeds to make herself an intensely powerful fist-fighter and heals herself after every time she punches people hard enough to break all the bones in her arms. That? That I liked. That’s great. Hey, can someone from a good anime steal that? I’d love to see that.

Watch My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! instead. It’s a great show. I liked it a lot. Even when it gives up on its premise of being about an isekai story in season two, what you get out of that is a fairly mid show about characters I already like which is more than I can say for this show which is about what if the worst fanfic author you know was emdowed with the powers of god.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[tumblunni]

Okay I know that kingdom hearts has a bad reputation for sticking crucial plot information on obscure spinoff games but HOLY SHIT I just finally watched a lets play of the fuckin digimon tcg game and found out it ACTUALLY HAS A GODDAMN CONCLUSION TO ANALOGMAN FROM DIGIMON WORLD 1

like 90% of the damn game has no plot whatsoever let alone indicating its a digimon world sequel! and then suddenly in the last battle without being foreshadowed whatsoever analogman returns and gets possibly the best boss battle ever IN A GODDAMN TCG GAME

holy shit his whole fight is framed as ‘this is literally the same guy from digimon world 1, hacking another game’, the interface wigs out and a bunch of fake command windows pop up with rapidly scrolling code of the game supposedly falling apart. And then his boss battle flips the entire gameplay system on its head by giving him fourth wall breaking special moves that pull overpowered effects by “hacking the engine”, with cool animations to fit. Fuckin badasssss!!

and it also fuckin FINALLY EXPLAINS THE DAMN PLOT LIKE GEEZ

digimon world’s conclusion was so rushed, you never even meet the villain until the final battle and it ends all weird with just “something” going wrong that causes him to get sucked into a portal or something while screaming dramatically in weirdly high resolution terror faces??? the tcg game confirms that this was him attempting to flee back to the human world after you defeated him, but one of the stray attacks from the battle damaged his machine and it caused him to essentially commit accidental suicide when he turned it on.

and HOLY SHIT MY FUCKIN OBSCURE HEADCANON IS TRUE????

the game had some sequel bait hints that maybe analogman is somehow still around and that the portal explosion just turned him into “corrupted data” so he can never return to the human world. and i always thought it would be super ironic if he actually got turned into a digimon aka the thing he hates more than anything

WELL OKAY I GUESS CRITICAL LORE IN A TCG GAME IS OKAY WHEN ITS A BIG YES BUNNI U THEORY BE CORRECT

he appears in this game as a malomyotismon who does a damn good vexen face during the fight, lol. And he’s all “gahh that stupid kid ruined my plans but this accursed body at least improved my hacking abilities!” Tho its implied that his corrupted state is more like a bodyless cloud of data that can possess/copy different digimon, which would be REALLY FUCKIN CRITICAL to explaining the goddamn plot of Digimon World Next Order!

Seriously wtf is up with this series? Digimon World 2 is not the sequel to Digimon World 1, all the numbered games are entirely separate individual stories with wildly different genres from pet sim to roguelike strategy. The real sequel is fucking DIGIMON THE CARD GAME THE GAME and then Digimon World Next Order a bazillion years later for the ps4. In which i am STILL REALLY SALTY that they have a FUCKIN RAD remix of analogman’s boss theme yet he doesn’t appear in the game. The added context of this damn tcg game confirms once and for all that the Ambiguous As Fuck Ending actually WAS him appearing in the game, this unexplained “oh wait the villain was good all along and he was just possessed by an evil virus” was supposed to be corrupted-digi-analogman and seriously WHY DONT THEY JUST FUCKIN EXPLAIN IT!!! this tcg game wasnt even released in europe!! and even american fans probably had no clue it was linked to this entirely separate subseries! You have to friggin piece it together with context clues like the battle music and the fact analogman’s signature mon was machinedramon. I mean vjesus christ Next Order is a litera; sequel with the grown up version of Digimon World’s protagonist as a badass home ec teacher who still defends the digital world in his free time yet you couldnt spare ONE LINE OF DIALOGUE mentioning the name of the villain?? and summarizing the fuckin tcg game everyone missed??? AND CONFIRMING THAT THE VILLAIN IS INDEED MAKING A REAPPEARANCE POSSESSING THIS GUY??? oh god everything makes SENSE, thank you terrible card game adaptation. ehh but i do still love Next Order for making Hiro/Mameo’s canon partner Mamemon, he’s even more badass as this big tough bishie version of himself with a tiny adorable pal that can shoot rocket fists through space and time. (its funny tho cos the DW1 intro movie showed metalmamemon and metalgreymon and the american boxart flipped a coin and decided metalgreymon must have been the one the protagonist was using in that scene. Whoops!)

anyway even with the added context that IT WAS INDEED GODDAMN ANALOGMAN, the final boss fight in Next Order was as terrible as the rest of the plot. So I’m glad trash gramps got a suitably badass boss fight after all, even if it was a CARD GAME VERSION! lets all celebrate the awesomeness of this obscure fuckin spinoff game’s obscure fuckin intercontinuity cameo with the boss fight music that other game wasted

seriously fuckin hell the biggest challenge in that final boss was that i was so distracted by SHEER OFFENDEDNESS at the cool music not matching it that it was hard to keep focused

its not just a great boss theme for a terrible boss, its a really fuckin EMOTIONAL song for anyone whose childhood was fuckin defined by the first game!!!

and look you had a PERFECT FUCKIN EXCUSE for a REALLY GOOD boss battle against MY MAN GRUMPY GRANDPA OF THE COOL DAMN NAME. Seriously guys analogman was THE FIRST digimon villain! digimon world came out before the anime, digimon world was the BETA FOR THE ANIME! this was the first place they had the ideas for file island, so much of the areas in the game are awkwardly mistranslated versions of stuff that would later appear in the anime in a different form. before this digimon had never been anything more than a fuckin 2-bit graphics tamagotchi and this was (after the manga) only the second goddamn time these monsters had an actual full colour character design! all of those charmingly janky 90s gross out show styled tcg illustrations? that was concept art that this game was working from! fuckin hell this game thought up the idea for metalgreymon’s changed design that ended up becoming the iconic partner of tai in the anime. (you can also see beta tai in the manga with a beta veemon as a partner instead! o_O)

SO LIKE...

JUST....

I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT ANALOGMAN OKAY!!! he’s a badly written guy with only like five sentences across all the videogames but fuckin hell he was such an Iconique part of the development of this series that they named him fucking ANALOGMAN

like dude you could have SO EASILY made me scream at my tv in a more positive way by bringing him out as the surprise villain and showing us wtf his deisgn is even supposed to look like cos god all we have is a blurry faceless early ps1 model buried under the glow filters of Mt Infinity’s funky background effects.

AND FUCKING

IF IT IS CANON

THAT MY FUCKIN

STUPID THEORY

IS CANON

slap a fuckin O on this man and LITERALLY LET ME BEAT HIM UP

like dont even give him a team or anything, just let me fight THE MAN HIMSELF

you canonically fuckin said he’s a digital ghost now and basically the same as a digimon

let me beat the shit out of a regular businessman in a suit and tie while he pulls his badass ‘i’m hacking the game i’m in’ bullshit from the GODDAMN TCG GAME THAT WAS MORE CLIMACTIC THAN YOUR SHITTY CASH GRAB FAKE SEQUEL

man god i didnt expect a fuckin TCG GAME to revive my righteous fury from back when i first played that piece of shit. i hate it cos Next order is so pretty and its gameplay is so good and i really loved my twin digis but there were SO MANY bugs and cut corners and missing content and really bad writing and GOD it made me so sad that the dub team really really tried, they tried so hard that they got fuckin renamon’s original voice actress back even though the renamon in this game has nothing to do with the anime one. THE DUB WAS REALLY GOOD BUT IT COULDNT SALVAGE THAT SCRIPT!! THE MUSIC WAS REALLY GOOD AND THE ART WAS REALLY GOOD AND THE DIGIMON THEMSELVES WERE MY BEST DAMN FRIENDS FOR THAT MONTH OF MY LIFE BUT THE GODDAMN FUCKIN SCRIPT!!! the postgame was MORE FUN because FINALLY everything opened up like the sandbox of the first game and you could just fuckin hug u digis without being distracted by constant cutscenes butchering your childhood nostalgia

man i wanted to write a fic/draw a comic about my headcanons on how to fix it but i never managed to do it cos holy shit it was basically “throw everything out and make a different game geez” I COULD RAMBLE FOR HOURS ABOUT THE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SEQUEL THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN!! and a fuckin!! tcg game!! was closer to that sequel!!!

and fuckin MY THEORY WAS RIGHT AND MY BETTER GAME IDEA ACTUALLY WOULD WORK IN CANON

fuck it im gonna do draw myself decking business gramps in the face

oh! and the female protagonist design! thats another rare good part of that thing! i loved the pixellization effect on her ponytal, way better than the male equivelant having a very ordinary costume design just with a pixel corner taken out of his jacket. also why did the plot never actually make a thing out of that? like you’d think that ‘unlike every other digimon tamer i’ve got this scar of my digitization’ would be a plot point. like they didnt give everyone else a cool pixel squares mark! they could have at least used it as an excuse why the protagonist is the Only Chosen One who can do all this plot shit. or if it was me i would have made it early foreshadowing for the Return Of Business Gramps, like you were partially infected by the Oooo Mysterious Unexplained Digi Virus (seriously why did they not just have ONE SENTENCE explaining its the fuckin original villain returning????) during the prologue and i dunno somehow that gives you powers to break analogman’s control on the digimon he possesses. or maybe the pixel thing is like a tracking device he put on you? or just give that cool design trait to the protagonist of digimon cyber sleuth instead, whose entire plot is that theyre a digimon human hybrid with literaly the power to pixellize themself into computers.

ALSO!!! actually do something!!! with mameo!!!

they really fuckin hyped up in all the prelease materials that the digimon world 1 protagonist was gonna be in this game and he’s all grown up now. and then he does NOTHING in the plot except babble exposition and stand around your home base. and has one line about how he’s a badass teacher now and his partner is mamemon but hey we made a bullshit excuse for why his digimon is sealed away and he never gets to fight :<

give me an actual cool teamup of new protag girl and her cool teacher dude beating the shit out of business trash with their bare fists and also their digimon’s bare fists while THE BEST DAMN MUSIC GOES UNWASTED

...fuck i sure do Feel Intensely about nostalgic games lol. i wonder if i’ll be so rambley when i play kh3? maybe itd be a really shitty lp, aaagh...

[xseedgames]

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection - Localization Blog #4

Can you hear it? A voice, booming and boisterous, blowing in upon the cool winds of autumn. A voice that beckons you to come sit a spell and play a good ol’ videogame. “They don’t make ‘em like this no more,” it says. “Well...most don’t. That’s why we need to sell a bunch’a copies, so they’ll get right to making Zwei 3! Yes siree, with Falcom’s storied lineage of action RPGs, it’d be a slam dunk! Ghahahaha!” That voice...is my voice, broad as the sea and hearty as a meal that consists solely of potatoes and slabs of meat.

That’s right, true believers, it’s Nick, here once again to share with you the myriad fascinations of working in videogame localization. If you’ve been keeping up, this is the fourth blog I’ve written about the upcoming release of Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection. The first entry gave a basic rundown of what the game is like and what you can expect from it, while the second entry went into more depth about the localization work and the nuances of character writing. The third entry was a progress report, detailing where we were in the QA cycle and why we’d be missing our summer release date.

Today, I’d like to tell you a story: the tale of how Zwei: II ended up with the expanded English voice acting it now boasts. Although this news has been known ever since we officially announced the game, I haven’t seen much discussion surrounding it, but the process of how “let’s add voice acting” went from pie-in-the-sky thought to reality is one I think you’ll find fascinating.

See, the interesting thing isn’t that we added English dubbing to Zwei: II. We weren’t able to secure the rights for the original Japanese voices, so it was pretty much a given we were going to do a dub. No, the most interesting part is that the dub adds a LOT more voicework than was present in the original. Why did we do that? How did we decide what to dub? And how much more is there, exactly? This and more I shall unfold for you, dear reader!

Zwei: II was designed without voice acting in its story scenes, and it holds up perfectly well that way, as classic RPGs do. But, that said, Zwei’s story is very driven by its outsized personalities. The characters really sell the scenes, and while I wrote for each of the characters in such a way as to accomplish that without the need for voice acting, their sometimes-cartoonish gusto and theatricality seemed like they’d be even more colorful when brought to life by VAs. I talked with the big boss, Ken, about the prospect, and he told me to put together a script so we could have the studio price out how much it would cost us.

To be honest, I’m still kind of surprised Ken was open to it. After all, Zwei: II isn’t a console release of a modern title – it’s a PC release of an older title. Maybe that goes to show how well-received Japanese games have been on PC in the last several years. Personally, I think a well-received game like Cold Steel leading the charge as far as “adding additional voice acting to a PC port” did a lot to open the door for a more modest title like Zwei to get a significant bump in voice acting. But success here provided my first challenge: putting together a script.

Now that adding more voice acting was on the table, the question then became, “Okay, so what do we actually voice?” All the battle stuff was covered at a bare minimum due to the fact that it was in the Japanese voice script, so the natural answer was, “Let’s just voice all the main story.” That’s a reasonable target, and not exceedingly difficult to pull from the full game script, since many of the main story scenes are positioned just before and after the game’s major boss battles. I began to assemble a “story scenes” voice script with all the scenes I thought most essential to conveying the game’s narrative, breaking it down scene by scene. After handing off a first draft to the studio and getting their estimate, I was given the green light, since it had apparently come in under what we were expecting.

But of course, ever being one to press my luck, I said, “Wellllll...actually there are a couple more scenes I COULD include!” And with a resigned sigh from Ken, I went back in and added a few scenes I had opted to leave on the cutting room floor during my first draft. As things stand, the new voice script’s coverage of story events isn’t perfect – there’s still one boss battle that has its before/after scenes unvoiced (I chose that one to drop because I felt that what was expressed there is also expressed in other voiced scenes well enough), but such are the choices one has to make at the crossroads of idealism and budgetary limitations.

The whole “voicing scenes before and after boss battles” approach worked well because it set up a good amount of consistency as to when players could expect to hear something voiced. It also, by the very nature of the scenes chosen, is really good at building the personalities of the game’s antagonists – which is helpful since they do a lot to spur Ragna and Alwen’s growth.

The unfortunate downside to my scene-selecting methodology is that I didn’t get to include many scenes outside of those. There are only two voiced scenes that aren’t tied to before/after boss encounters – one in which Ragna talks about his past (which I thought gave good insight into his character), and a key one at the very start of the game in which Ragna discovers that Alwen is, in fact, a vampire, and they have their first long discussion about their blood contract and how Ragna wants to be equal partners. That’s such a defining scene that sets up both protagonists perfectly for everything that is to come that there was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted that one voiced.

At this point, let’s stop for a moment and examine the script. The original Japanese script was 808 lines. The number of lines in the new voice script, however, clocked in at 2807. That’s basically 2000 newly voiced lines, all story. And while it may not seem gigantic in light of a game like Trails of Cold Steel, you’ll certainly be able to feel the presence of the voice acting as you play through the game. Ragna and Alwen in particular saw massive increases: from 88 and 89 to 724 and 548, respectively. We even picked up an entirely new character who had no lines in the original Japanese voice script but did factor into several of the story scenes I had selected!

When casting, I conferred with both Tom and Kris to get their general impressions, and to solicit suggestions in cases where I didn’t have any particular VA in mind. Zwei: II is a game that wears its heart on its sleeve, so I was casting with an ear toward a “Saturday Morning Cartoon” feel – expressive voices that have a touch of exaggeration in them. It was a different feel than we’d chased when casting for Trails of Cold Steel, but it got us the sound we were looking for.

Recording took six days, with a stream of VAs coming in to lend us their talent. John accompanied me for the first couple days, while Tom helped in the latter half, both lending some much-welcomed aid by helping me keep track of any changes we made to lines during recording while I was focusing on the line deliveries. To level with you a bit here, I’ve never been the most organized person, so the voice recording process, with its focus on having everything triple-checked and accounted for, has always felt pretty daunting to me. After all, there’s always that cold dread that you’ll have an actor in the booth and suddenly, some problem with the script files will pop up, costing you precious time when every minute has value. Thankfully, there were no complications with Zwei’s recording – it was actually a pretty smooth, pleasant time (though very busy). Some of our VAs I had worked with before, so seeing them again and trying them in different-sounding roles was fun. Other VAs I was meeting for the first time, and I enjoyed getting to see them at work, as well as seeing what kind of vocal ranges they could pull off (always helpful when we’re brainstorming voice casts for future projects).

Our voice director was someone I’d met before, and in fact someone I requested by name after discerning how deep his knowledge ran concerning things of the nerdy persuasion. For Zwei, I didn’t want to take a chance on a director that only had a surface-level understanding of anime – I wanted to be able to throw out oddly specific requests like “Play it more like X from the series Y!” and have them understand the voicing intent behind that and translate it into instructions the VAs could make sense of.

Talking with him over the course of the project was a mile-a-minute ride, but among all the really nerdy stuff we talked about, one common thread that really stuck with me is his identification of Zwei as a “pulp story.” Before then, I’d approached Zwei in my mind from that anime-centric perspective it so clearly embodies, but our conversations got me wondering how, as a fan of pulp-style stuff, I’d never consciously made that connection before. In another universe where Zwei wasn’t a Japanese videogame, it feels like it’d be a natural fit as a weekly radio serial. The character influences I mentioned in my second blog post all led to “pulp” too, when I followed the strings back.

Back at work, I reviewed all the voice files and marked the ones that needed filters applied, as you do when, for instance, someone is talking to a character telepathically or is possessed by a demon (y’know, your general RPG happenings), and we got them into the game. There’s something of a sense of trepidation that comes when you finally drop all those voices into the game proper. You hold your breath, thinking, “That was so much work... I reeeeeeally hope this sounds good!” Fortunately, our VAs didn’t disappoint, and hearing some of my favorite scenes brought to life through performance really helped sell the emotion of the scenes, just as I’d hoped at the outset.

Now, maybe you’re not fond of dubs. Or maybe you’re a purist, wanting to experience the game without the addition of a bunch of voice acting that wasn’t in the original. Believe me, I totally understand you. Thankfully, the voice volume is on a separate slider, so you can crank it down and read through at your own pace, with the voices you imagine the characters to have. That kind of experience is fun too, I think, and I’m interested in what those of you who play it both ways think about the ways in which the dub shapes how one perceives the story and characters.

Of course, for you fans of RPG dubs, I’m also interested to discover which characters will become fan-favorites and which lines will be the most entertaining and memorable. Our programmer, Sara, has even gone above and beyond with filled-out lip flap for the dubbed scenes! In the original game, there’s a brief lip-flap that’s tied to the scroll-out speed of text in a character’s text box. What that means in practice is that their mouths move for about a second while the text is displaying, then once it’s all there on screen, their mouth doesn’t move anymore. It’s a perfectly sensible setup for a game without voiced story lines, but in the cases where lines were voiced, I wanted the lip flap to continue as long as the voiced line was still playing. From the sound of it, it took some real doing, but the lip flap does indeed now track to the length of the voice clip in cases where story lines are voiced. It might seem to be a minor detail, but I think it’s details like this that help make the experience feel well integrated and authentic.

In any case, you won’t have to wonder too much longer what the game sounds like, because it’s finally out in less than a week, with a Trueblood vampire-approved release date of October 31st. I hope you’ll enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed working on it. After all...everyone could use a little more PASSION in their souls!