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June 29, 2009
Yeah, you can probably tell what's coming next.
So I don't know if it's the drab and damp weather we've had for nearly a month or some dread disease that I've contracted, but I've been dead tired lately. Like, to the point that it's often difficult to even stand up. The obvious solution, of course, is to simply not get up. Normally that would be a little tricky, since there are a variety of factors in my life that require me to get off my butt, not the least of which is my job. However, this time I have been stricken right at the beginning of a week-long vacation, and not just any vacation, but a vacation where my entire plan was to just sit around and do nothing. Score! This past Saturday marked the beginning of a whimsical journey where I sleep as long as I want, and when I finally do get up I just sit around playing videogames. Hopefully by next Sunday I'll have finished Wario Land: Shake It!, Shining Force CD, the origianl Final Fantasy from the GBA Dawn of Souls collection, and F.E.A.R. 2., as well as snagged those irritating random drops I've been grinding for in Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. Yes, friends, as much as I might rant and complain, sometimes life can be pretty sweet.
Speaking of Shining Force CD, when I was playing it last night a thought occurred to me. As regular readers may know, in the last year or so I've played through a number of titles for older CD-based platforms like the Sega CD and Turbo-Duo, and something that has struck me when playing many of these games is that the voice acting is actually quite good. Shining Force CD continues this trend. As someone who was introduced to voice acting in console games by the original Playstation, this seems very strange. The era of the Playstation and Sega Saturn was typified by, among other things, absolutely atrocious voice acting in games. Sure, there were exceptions such as Mega Man Legends or Brave Fencer Musashi, but overall voice actors from that era tended to deliver their lines with the same degree of enthusiasm as a deadbeat dad at a parent-teacher conference. I had always assumed this was simply because many of these game developers hadn't dealt with voice acting in games before, and that as time went by and they became more familiar with the idea, things would inevitably get better. Sure enough that seems to be what happened. Nowadays most videogame voice acting is at least reasonably solid. It might not always rise to the level of that found in big-budget animated films, but at least it no longer makes playing games in the same room as your girlfriend or parents a horrible embarrassment. The funny thing is, though, there was clearly a fair amount of good voice acting in games before the Playstation era. Of the five pre-Playstation era CD games I've played, three have had good voice acting (Popful Mail, Ys, and Shining Force CD), and one (Snatcher) had absolutely phenomenal voice work. Granted, maybe I've just been playing the right games. Snatcher, being essentially a visual novel, was going to live or die by it's voice acting, so maybe they just felt the need to really get things right in that instance. Popful Mail was localized by Working Designs who, love them or hate them, always put a lot of effort into their titles. And Shining Force CD doesn't really have all that much voice work in it, so maybe they just got lucky. I don't know. The only other thing all these games have in common is that they were unquestionably cult titles (with the possible exception of Ys) and released on less-successful platforms. Maybe knowing they were targeting a very niche and very picky audience made the developers/localizers want to go the extra mile to please them, while when gaming became more mainstream with the advent of the Playstation, knowing the boorish tastes of the average consumer, game makers just stopped caring. As my experience with pre-Playsation/Saturn CD games deepens, I'll be curious to see if this trend continues.
Right now, though, I'm going to fold some laundry while I rock out to the tunes of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.
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