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Thread: No voice acting in Nintendo video games: What gives?

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    Default No voice acting in Nintendo video games: What gives?

    As video games become more and more like movies, Nintendo's refusal to use voice actors rather than text is baffling. I just came from Wal-Mart and my not quite literate six year old son had to have me read the text in the new WiiU Zelda game, which can't be a huge selling point for either parents of young children nor the children themselves. I know there are exceptions (Other M comes to mind), but they are the exception, unfortunately. Not using voice actors for flagship titles from such a large video game company is just cheap and, not to get on too much of a whining tangent, insulting. "We know hardcore Nintendo fans will buy ___ regardless of if we shell out money for voice acting, so why waste the money?"

    Has this stuck out to anyone else? What reasons might the Big N have for this decision? For all of Nintendo's innovations they sure do stubbornly lag behind in more than a few areas of the industry.

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    I've never gotten this with Zelda, especially. Do they know that there are games where the protagonist is completely silent and everyone else talks? I know they want Link to be essentially a self-insert for the player, but you can just imagine that you're actually Link if it's how you play.

    Stuff like this isn't gonna change until the people at the top at Nintendo are gone, unfortunately.

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    Peach (Level 3) PreZZ's Avatar
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    Remember Metroid other m or the intro to mario sunshine? so awful!! I dont really care for voice acting in Nintendo games, and Zelda is way too hard for a 6 year old kid.

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    Quote Originally Posted by PreZZ View Post
    Remember Metroid other m or the intro to mario sunshine? so awful!! I dont really care for voice acting in Nintendo games, and Zelda is way too hard for a 6 year old kid.
    Give them access to a guidebook or something when they get lost and they're fine. Besides, comparing Other M to thousands of other games that actually have good voice acting and stories is an insult.

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    Sounds like a good opportunity to sit with your kid and improve their reading skills while playing a game. You can do all the silly voices too!
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    As someone who routinely starts a game by searching for a "turn shitty voice acting off" button in the options menu, I don't see the problem with the lack of voice acting.

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    Pac-Man (Level 10) Rickstilwell1's Avatar
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    Yeah I'll second the reading part. Games that force you to teach your kids to read are better for them. The sooner they learn all the big words, the smarter they will become sooner. I learned to read quite young and games like Dragon Warrior really helped with that.
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    I highly doubt it's a cost-cutting measure. It strikes me as an intentional design choice.

    While I really love the voice acting in some games, I don't think EVERY game in existence needs to be fully-voiced, and I find it refreshing that Nintendo at least continues to release some games without voices. I kind of miss the days in which you'd simply read and use your own imagination as to how the character sounds and how the line is delivered. Sometimes that's even more immersive for me because bad acting, which is still prevalent in games in my opinion, especially in dubbed over Japanese games, really takes me out of the scene and the experience.

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    I'm very glad that they minimize it. I hate the Mario and Yoshi voices. The GBA ports of many classic Mario games are made worse, at least to my ears when I hear shit like "lucky!" in Super Mario Bros. 2, and the Yoshi sounds when Yoshi jumps in Yoshi's Island.

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    Star Fox 64 has made me leery for 15 years now on Nintendo voice acting. But I wouldn't mind high quality voice acting where appropriate. I just hope that Link always reminds silent in Zelda releases like Gordon Freeman in the Half-Life franchise.

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    Cost nothing, it's entirely choice. Nintendo made it a choice years ago as they've been asked by the media about it before back in the Gamecube era when they clearly had the space versus N64 carts to do it. I remember a mix of reasons from not wanting to be stuck with something that not everyone will like (like how Sega regularly caught shit over voices in Sonic Adventure and later titles), people having creative minds to put their own voice to it, and just to promote reading too. Also for me and others, it's just easier and faster to speed read through something instead of having some slower paced windbag crap on about shit. I'll take any chance in a game to turn on subtitles so I can just interrupt rambling sentences once I've read the line.

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    Being Nintendo, I kind of expect something like this. First party titles from Nintendo tend to be rather cheap. Sure they look nice, but they also don't ever push the power of the hardware. Super Mario 3D World for instance. Sure it wouldn't be able to run on the Wii, but graphically it doesn't look too far off. It looks a bit better than Galaxy 2, but that's it, a bit better.

    Nintendo couldn't even put in the effort for the 3D mode to be active anywhere in Pokemon X/Y except for battles, and even then it's some of the laziest 3D on the 3DS. Then there's Fire Emblem Awakening and the characters with no feet, and the reason isn't because it couldn't be done, but at first they didn't know how many joints they'd need for the body parts, and then after getting it done, they thought it'd be easier to just do without. Simply because it's easier and cost effective to not go back and fix it.

    The games Nintendo pushes out isn't shovelware, well, some is, but they're all definitely low budget compared to most games.
    Everything in the above post is opinion unless stated otherwise.

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    Pac-Man (Level 10) Rickstilwell1's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kupomogli View Post
    Being Nintendo, I kind of expect something like this. First party titles from Nintendo tend to be rather cheap. Sure they look nice, but they also don't ever push the power of the hardware. Super Mario 3D World for instance. Sure it wouldn't be able to run on the Wii, but graphically it doesn't look too far off. It looks a bit better than Galaxy 2, but that's it, a bit better.

    Nintendo couldn't even put in the effort for the 3D mode to be active anywhere in Pokemon X/Y except for battles, and even then it's some of the laziest 3D on the 3DS. Then there's Fire Emblem Awakening and the characters with no feet, and the reason isn't because it couldn't be done, but at first they didn't know how many joints they'd need for the body parts, and then after getting it done, they thought it'd be easier to just do without. Simply because it's easier and cost effective to not go back and fix it.

    The games Nintendo pushes out isn't shovelware, well, some is, but they're all definitely low budget compared to most games.
    Exactly, and at the same time we read articles about how the "industry is going to crash because of corporations and too big of budgets for games." If anyone breaks the rule that those articles speak of it's Nintendo and some indie mobile game developers.
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    Quote Originally Posted by kupomogli View Post
    Being Nintendo, I kind of expect something like this. First party titles from Nintendo tend to be rather cheap. Sure they look nice, but they also don't ever push the power of the hardware. Super Mario 3D World for instance. Sure it wouldn't be able to run on the Wii, but graphically it doesn't look too far off. It looks a bit better than Galaxy 2, but that's it, a bit better.

    Hahaha. What is this?

    Its like... if graphics aren't complex its must be 'cheap'. Never mind the aesthetic choice of game designers being the deciding factor in how games look.

    EDIT: And further more, often times things that look 'simple' in final form aren't that simple to execute behind the scenes.

    Like your Pokemon XY example. Do you know WHY the overworld lacks stereoscopic 3D? Because Game Freak was pushing the graphics capabilities of the 3DS to their Max and couldn't incorporate the necessarily graphic information necessary for 3D mode without sacrificing their graphical design for the game.
    Last edited by The Adventurer; 01-02-2014 at 01:30 AM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by The Adventurer View Post
    Like your Pokemon XY example. Do you know WHY the overworld lacks stereoscopic 3D? Because Game Freak was pushing the graphics capabilities of the 3DS to their Max and couldn't incorporate the necessarily graphic information necessary for 3D mode without sacrificing their graphical design for the game.
    Battles in Pokemon X and Y have noticeable lag that sometimes drops to 15fps without the 3D even on, yet they had no problem including the 3D to an already lag ridden battle system. The reason why they didn't include 3D is because the world map is far larger and would have taken much more time, effort, and money. Chalk it up to Nintendo being cheap. Nothing more. The very first developer to have almost no 3D in the game and it's first party. Nintendo definitely setting a great example.

    Pokemon X and Y are good looking games, but there are better looking games that have 3D throughout their entirety. Lords of Shadow Mirror of Fate(best looking 3D,) Resident Evil Revelations, SMT4, Tales of the Abyss, Dead or Alive Dimensions, Metal Gear Solid 3D(poor port though,) Mario Kart 7, etc.

    *edit*

    Oh, and Tales of the Abyss' 3D isn't very good, but that's besides the point. The game atleast has 3D throughout. They didn't just skimp out on the very feature Nintendo pushed as the selling point of the system.
    Last edited by kupomogli; 01-02-2014 at 02:36 AM.
    Everything in the above post is opinion unless stated otherwise.

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    Uh, there's a reason why the 2DS launched at the same time as Pokemon X/Y. Prolonged use of the 3D mode isn't good for the developing eyes of young children, and a large percentage of the Pokemon demographic is young children. It doesn't make sense to have 3D throughout the entire, lengthy game when a ton of the players either won't have access to the 3D mode (because they have a 2DS) or aren't recommended to use it a great deal.

    As for Fire Emblem, when Awakening was being developed, it wasn't exactly a flagship series for Nintendo anymore. Sales of each new release had been dwindling and dwindling, and had the sales of Awakening not been so great, it would've been the last Fire Emblem. The main reason it's such a well-received game is because the developers wanted, at the very least, for the series to go out with a bang. If they let one tiny, insignificant detail slide under those conditions, when they were putting so much effort into everything else, I can hardly blame them. It's not at all a matter of "omg nintendo is so cheap and lazy lol".

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    Remember, reading is fundamental.

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    Come on now kupo there is an insider with Nintendo, he must be with all these big facts getting in the way of all the rational arguments here. This thread must be over because clearly Nintendo is cheap and that is that, nothing else ever comes into play with them other than cutting corners and sacrifices because they don't want to invest the time, money or effort into their work.

    Funny how this went from voice acting into overall cheapness bashing isn't it? Even in their bigger days of the Wii and all their other non-first place profitable years they always have stuck to what I said in my post about voices and it makes sense. To start applying that to design decisions over the capabilities of the hardware, the learning curve of that hardware, or the target audience is just baiting a fight. Perhaps it would be best to stay on topic and make another thread dumping on their choices in design where it can either be ignored or debated.

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    I usually prefer games to not have too much voice acting, it's something less to screw up. There are games with good voice acting, but so many more with lousy acting.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Aussie2B View Post
    Uh, there's a reason why the 2DS launched at the same time as Pokemon X/Y. Prolonged use of the 3D mode isn't good for the developing eyes of young children, and a large percentage of the Pokemon demographic is young children. It doesn't make sense to have 3D throughout the entire, lengthy game when a ton of the players either won't have access to the 3D mode (because they have a 2DS) or aren't recommended to use it a great deal.
    So because they released 2DS it's fine that they just half ass their attempts on 3D now, the very selling point of the console in the first place? Super Mario 3D Land and New Super Mario Bros 2 will potentially have as much playtime as Pokemon X and Y for a kid and both are in 3D.

    Leaving the 3D off one game isn't going to stop children from using it on other games on the system.
    Everything in the above post is opinion unless stated otherwise.

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