The last, best Final Fantasy for me was number 6. The switch over to 3D just plain killed it. That's when they went cut-scene crazy and the game mechanics started getting overly convoluted. Heck, I was saying it back when VII first came out--if I wanted to watch a movie, I'd watch a movie, not play a game. But Square-Enix fans both in Japan and the U.S. eat this stuff up. I have no idea why. I personally think you kind of have to have masochistic tendencies to begin with to play some of these RPGs, considering the time commitment you have to make if you ever hope to finish them.

VII was amazing, never played VIII or beyond, other than Tactics, which I also loved. IV and VI are favorites as well.

Oh, Dirge of Cerberus was really awesome, too. I played it in Japanese, though. I heard the English dub was terrible.

A little look at a longer video of the context and a video of that portion in the original Japanese shows that the laughing was supposed to be purposefully ridiculous, but the way it's done in the English version comes off less ridiculous and more pathetic.

Besides that, this isn't so much a case of bad writing as it is the problem all dubs have: trying to come up with something that somewhat fits the mouth movements of the characters who were meant to be speaking another language. This results in things not really being a direct translation, and often ends up sounding really stupid. I would rather they just sub the cutscenes in English; they'd save money on paying voice actors to do shitty jobs at crappy semi-translated lines.

Awesome crap. Nice post.

Easily one of the most awkward and forced scenes in the history of gaming. I remember getting out of my chair and making a snack while I waited for this to be over with.

Also, I'm pretty sure that price tag referred to the original price of developing the game in Japan, not how much they spent on the US port.

Final Fantasy VII introduced me to the series, I was..9, when it came out, and it was the first time I played a video-game with that much story to it / character depth, ect.

I can't remember where its from, but a website basically said why FF VII also had one of the greatest baddies of the series, "Men like him because of his bad-assery, and his 8-foot sword. Women like him because of his long silver hair, his good looks, and his 8-foot sword."

Final Fantasy 8 Was good..until around the mid 3rd disc, then the story went completely downhill

Final Fantasy 9 was alright, got back to more of a decent storyline

and then..we have FF X. It was alright for a while, I mean, how can you not love a game where one of the main characters is voiced by Bender Bending Rodriguez.

Then we move on to one of my favourite characters, the drunken 2-handed sword wielding badass from beyond the grave...

Then we have tidus. The Luke Skywalker of final fantasies. Never, has there been such a whiney bitch in a video game before, or after final fantasy X.
Half the time, my party didn't even have him in it. For all I'm concerned, Tidus could go jump of a bridge, and never return to the final fantasy series.
Unfortunately, he does in FFX-2 apparently..never played it though.

But this scene..has to be the worst one in final fantasy history. Good sift, I'll watch and hate it frequently.

Just wanted to add that dubbing is much harder than getting the words synchronized with lip movement.
Oftentimes, words and sentences of one language can't be directly translated into another. They can, for instance, have cultural aswell as linguistical differences, not to mention that proverbs and slang expressions can be notoriously difficult to translate with their original meaning intact. The dubbers also have to take into consideration regional dialects and find a suitable counterpart in the second language in order to preserve the atmosphere of the game.
With a budget of $32 million, it's hard to believe the producers simply wouldn't care to put any effort in the English-speaking version of the game. To me, it sounds more likely they hired some dubbing company with solid television experience but with a sketchy background in computer game cutscenes, resulting in what we see here. Also, the writer and dubber teams could have been separate groups with no direct contact with each other, which understandably makes it harder for both to do their job effectively (not to mention if one is based in Japan and the other in the US).
I'm sure there are people who don't find this cutscene appaling in the least, there might even be people who enjoy it thoroughly. We who didn't like this at all might simply be the wrong crowd, and not the people they were aiming for. It's kind of like how I obviously was the wrong crowd for Final Fantasy 7, a game which is revered around these parts but something I personally just couldn't enjoy in the slightest.
Even though this particular cutscene was almost unbearable, I wouldn't say the dubbing of the whole game was bad, nor that it's the dubbing itself that's the real problem.
It could be interesting to see the same cutscene in its original language (Japanese?) and compare the two. Is it the translation, the script, the voice actors or a bit of everything?

>> ^JAPR:
Besides that, this isn't so much a case of bad writing as it is the problem all dubs have: trying to come up with something that somewhat fits the mouth movements of the characters who were meant to be speaking another language. This results in things not really being a direct translation, and often ends up sounding really stupid. I would rather they just sub the cutscenes in English; they'd save money on paying voice actors to do shitty jobs at crappy semi-translated lines.


>> ^JAPR:
Also, I'm pretty sure that price tag referred to the original price of developing the game in Japan, not how much they spent on the US port.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBHIgh3MEJU

Here's that scene in Japanese. Like I said, it's still ridiculous, but not quite as bad.

I agree that it's still ridiculous in the Japanese version, turns out it's the acting and script we've got a problem with
But what I wanted to say before was that the cutscene isn't necessarily bad because it's not a direct translation of the Japanese version, and that it could actually have been worse had it been directly translated.
Being a high-budget production, it's not out of line to assume they had a plan for dubbing it, but either the communication went wrong at some point or we weren't the target audience for the dubbing.
I wasn't trying to get at you with the post, but instead trying to flesh out your comment with some thoughts on the whole process, because it's quite the ordeal to translate something and it's so much more than just trying to fit the speech to the characters' mouth movement. We both agree that the cutscene wasn't very enjoyable, after all.

in reality porthole cost a tun to make.

gable newel happened to be one of the Microsoft crew and is friends with bill gates not surprisingly he and his co founder of valve had a but tun of money that allowed them a shed load of time to develop half life 1 (which insolently had a ridiculous Dev time and cycle)

porthole core game play concept was designing and put together by a bunch of students had valve ore a publisher not thrown a tun of money/time/staff at it its unlikely anyone would know ore Evan care about it now.

valve have made a tun of good dessisoins and constantly produce good games and thay are very talented people , however you do have to bare in mind that there are thousands of people with the same talent and sometimes more who cannot get annywhere within games evan with the most fantastic of concepts simply because thay don't have the cash in hand and are forced to pander to publishers/financiers whims.

No, I got what you were saying.

I think the thing is, the Japanese game-makers frankly probably don't really care about how the dubbing's going to go for foreign releases any more than we think about dubbing in foreign countries when we make movies. The focus is just to make something that you feel is a good piece of work, and you can't really take the time to try and think about how to make it easier to dub into foreign languages.

On the note of "direct translation"...

Translating isn't about simply translating directly, due to both cultural ideas and idiomatic phrases, it's rather about finding the right balance between actual meaning and putting it into a natural phrasing for the language you're translating it into. As has often been said, it's more of an art than a science, but oftentimes people opt to go too loose on the translations and lose a lot of things, but still somehow fail to put it into comfortable, natural English. Of course, there are other things to take into account too, such as how natural the phrase is in the original language...if something's written to be awkward, it should have the same feel when translated.

There are a lot of things that add into it, translation's a pretty delicate thing that takes a lot of time and effort to do well.

What they say in the Japanese version for this part:

(right before this she tells him to try smiling and then to try shouting out)
Yuna: alright, try it.

*ridiculous forced laugh*

Yuna: you don't have to go that far...
(vs. you...probably shouldn't laugh anymore
I find that statement ridiculous, because he's not supposed to be actually laughing, so that line makes this scene seem even more ridiculous in the English version)

*she giggles, more forced laughter, then the two actually laugh*

Yuna: (too) funny...
(this works here, but the WAY she says it in the English version just sounds really unnatural)

Tidus: It's your fault
(he doesn't say idea )

Basically, when you look at the Japanese voice acting in this game, while there are definitely very melodramatic parts, the normal, everyday sort of lines are spoken for the most part as they actually would be said, whereas in the English dubs, they tend to try to imitate anime characters or something, as is seen in Yuna's disgusting "TOOO Funny!" in the English dub here.

The result, of course, is crap. While it's POSSIBLE to do a good dub, it'd be easier on all of us to just sub it and save a lot of money and time on the English release. On top of that, they wouldn't have to worry about crappy voice acting like this degrading an otherwise very good game.

I'd like to have a random encounter with her.

/\
BA-DOOM TISH! HEY-OH!!

Thats the laugh you sound while you stamp on the heads of puppies...