just an fyi that if this is your first exposure to FFX and you want to hop on the bandwagon of being a smug little brat about the supposedly "awful" voice acting (it's not, it's remarkably accomplished and effective considering the insane tech constraints the team was working under--the depth of performance these actors were able to achieve still blows more current games and their aggressively codified anime archetype voices out of the water! good luck finding protagonists with as specific and non-cliche intonations as Tidus/Yuna. Watching Hedy Buress' thoughtful interview featurette about playing Yuna literally makes me cry) you should know that you probably are feeling a weird friction between the voice/characters moreso because the hd remaster completely butchered so much of the animation and visual storytelling present in the faces of the original character models, which the english voice actors were directly responding to and taking influence from in their performances! OG Yuna had so much intimate detail written into her ps2-era features--her gentle, tired eyes, full of fatigue but never resignation. This new baby eyed smoothface Dissidia treatment has turned both our protags into puffy blowfish with hyper-saturated irises and deer in the headlights stares, and the pioneering facial animation from the og has all but been completely erased! literally you are seeing a vastly inferior treatment than 20 years ago. Devastating 2 observe this homunculus pantomime, truly can not bear it
also deriding the laughing scene for being cringe is so tedious, it IS cringe but in a beautiful and very real, well contextualized way and the reason the game contains this "cringe" scene is also the reason its literally the only convincing romance in like any videogame ever made !!!! sad how you've all forgotten how to love, i will be praying 4 u
FFX is an all timer for me and my connection to the mastery present in like every specific element of its original iteration have made playing this remaster completely impossible lol
maybe you will experience much less revulsion to the facial animation than me and i truly hope you do because this is one of the most holistically well considered and thematically cogent Final Fantasies and jrpgs in general. Just play the OG upscaled i literally just did and it looked infinitely more appealing than this
also deriding the laughing scene for being cringe is so tedious, it IS cringe but in a beautiful and very real, well contextualized way and the reason the game contains this "cringe" scene is also the reason its literally the only convincing romance in like any videogame ever made !!!! sad how you've all forgotten how to love, i will be praying 4 u
FFX is an all timer for me and my connection to the mastery present in like every specific element of its original iteration have made playing this remaster completely impossible lol
maybe you will experience much less revulsion to the facial animation than me and i truly hope you do because this is one of the most holistically well considered and thematically cogent Final Fantasies and jrpgs in general. Just play the OG upscaled i literally just did and it looked infinitely more appealing than this
4 Comments
@dwardman I completely relate! I used to get SO close to the screen and just scour these facial animations in complete awe. They made such intelligent use of so little--the little dreary-eyed knowing head nod and slow blink Yuna does in the Zanarkand ruins intro scene when Tidus places his hand on her shoulder isnt like, THAT technologically overwhelming or complex but it conveyed such a specificity of feeling I had never seen in a game before. People sort of condemn Hedy Buress for "paying too much attention to the lip flaps" when doing the ADR and dubbing for Yuna, saying it gave her a sort of arrhythmic halting speech pattern, but I think it created a completely unique and kind of rapturous style of performance--you can just tell how utterly attentive to every facial tweak she was while working, how every slight gesture influenced her vocal inflection. That's just totally lost in this flat-faced remaster, and I guess I can see why people would interpret the performance so scathingly now :( To me, at it's best, Final Fantasy is a grand otherworldy melodrama, and the tech limitation-induced cadences of these performances still feel so magical and fitting and unique. There are so many different types of valid performance style, and it feels like a step down now that the series is in a more "competent" standardized anime industry timbre.
also WOW I 100% feel the same way about what we've seen of the Nier remaster faces, especially in regards to Kaine. I think, even with the best artistic intentions, it can be incredibly fraught to re-render a character face in remakes/remasters like this, particularly when the generational graphical leap isn't THAT large in the first place. I dont want to be too pessimistic or cruel about the hands behind these tweaks because I'm sure a lot of studio members care deeply for these characters and want to do them justice but after a certain point, if its THAT impossible to execute, maybe stick with the original or just add a subdivision modifier or two on the original mesh and call it a day!
also WOW I 100% feel the same way about what we've seen of the Nier remaster faces, especially in regards to Kaine. I think, even with the best artistic intentions, it can be incredibly fraught to re-render a character face in remakes/remasters like this, particularly when the generational graphical leap isn't THAT large in the first place. I dont want to be too pessimistic or cruel about the hands behind these tweaks because I'm sure a lot of studio members care deeply for these characters and want to do them justice but after a certain point, if its THAT impossible to execute, maybe stick with the original or just add a subdivision modifier or two on the original mesh and call it a day!
Honestly the OST being so much worse rendition wise to me kind of soured my interest in playing it too past the first area, which might be worth mentioning. The extreme ultra-clean look really does not suit FFX much at all.
Yeah there are a few tracks in the remaster that felt like slightly interesting or novel arrangements to me (Illusion, Scorching Desert, and Wandering Flame have different, but kind of interesting, vibes) but its mostly a soupy less memorable version of the melodies in the original, with some weirdly less sophisticated sample synths :( At least they had some sense and left Splendid Performance the hell alone
dwardman
3 years ago
The HD version also I feel has some worse background elements and textures. Kind of a real shame and example of how hard it is to properly recapture the old work in quite the right way since they had to redo everything from scratch