Dear Internet,
When I
last I left off, I was going to talk about voice acting. It is safe to say that my project will have
none of that fluff. As a one person team,
I would have to do every single voice.
While this would no doubt be quite humorous, it would alter the mood of
most scenes. Let me say that I am not an
individual of a hundred voices. I barely
have a single voice, and it would make things quite strange if that same voice
acted out a number of parts, many of which would require a pitch that I just
cannot throw. Maybe for a short comedy
visual novel I would, but not for this.
I do
not mind voice acting in visual novels.
The only problem is that the only time I have heard it done well is with
the Japanese voices. That itself is a
problem because I am mostly unable to tell if it is even being done right in
Japanese. They may be doing a horrible
job at it, but I cannot tell. Either
way, I usually just let the voice acting play out as long as it keeps up with
my reading speed. If the reading of the
lines get too long and the text is just sitting there, I will go ahead and keep
reading without waiting for the voice to catch up. But this is only when I have the Japanese
voices on. I treat it as background
sounds at best.
English
voice acting for visual novels falls into two categories. Either a voice acting veteran or a horrible
amateur is doing it. In the case of the
veteran, you will end up thinking about all the other characters that the actor
has played, making your mind wander away from the scene and words. In the case of the amateur, you will get a
refreshing and new voice at the cost of, well, a high chance of wanting to mute
the whole thing altogether. If you
cannot mute the voices specifically but want to listen to the music, you will
end up reading the text as quick as it can display, jamming the advance button,
and forcing the speech clips to shorten into lengths of two words apiece. It creates a mildly amusing sound as everyone
sounds like they are gargling marbles.
Then
there is the worst case scenario. That
is when the voices do not even match up to the text. "Lux-Pain" is the greatest example
of a visual novel kind of game where the localization went absolutely down two
dead end streets. From what I could
gather messing around forum boards, the translation had been split up between
two to three teams. This meant that
location names not only were different in one half of the game as compared to
the other half, but the voice acting did not even match up to what was being
displayed. I think there was even a
section where the player had to answer questions, recalling information that had
been relayed to them. Those questions
asked about some of these mixed up translation errors, which left the player
not even knowing whether the info they were told was accurate.
There
is one thing that I want to mention concerning voice acting in a visual novel
format. Line length when using spoken
dialog needs to be properly balanced out to ensure proper pacing. This falls back into the pacing issue when
using just text that I mentioned in an earlier Log. If the spoken text is excessively long to the
point that it slows down a fact paced scene, it needs to be reworked. If the spoken text hurries onward when the
scene needs to be stretched out, it needs to be reworked. The best instance I can think of when this gets
done poorly is when a character has to scream or cry. What happens is that the voice actor has to
make a long cry or yell when the text that is being displayed is vastly shorter
and gets displayed quickly. The reader
ends up sitting there with a fully displayed text bubble and has to wait for
the exceptionally long moan has to be delivered. The scene's flow has to instantly stop while
the voice actor finishes a single line. There
has to be a middle ground where the scene continues its flow without
compromising the two elements, text and sound.
Thankfully,
having none of this in my project means that I do not have to worry about it.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
Current Assets
Writing: ~650 lines
Coding: ~35 lines
Art: 0%
Audio: 0%
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