Now, I do not inherently dislike battle dialogue, if anything it can be somewhat charming and memorable. However, I believe the dialogue has been getting progressively worse/obnoxious as the series goes on. I am specifically talking about the noise and volume of battle. Allow me to explain myself.
I should begin by saying that calling out art names, in general, is fine. I think calling out the names of the moves is fun, that is not what I am arguing against here. By extension some (I'm looking at you Rex) grunts and weapon sound effects are good in terms of quality and volume. I am mostly talking about everything each game puts on top of that.
Let us start with Xenoblade Chronicles. I believe XC1 to be the best in terms of this aspect. There are of course the memish lines like "Reyn time" "I'm feeling it" "Is that all you've got?", but I quite enjoyed most of these. Monolith just needs to get better at the frequency some of these lines play, and that goes across all of the games. Other than those there is one other type of dialogue between characters. While there is not a wide variety of these particular lines per character they work for one simple reason: They bounce off of each other. XC had a tension system where allies could be encouraged and aided in battle. This meant bringing toppled allies to their feet, encouraging discouraged allies, warning others of visions, etc. This carried into battle so their banter outside of arts was not all fluff. When Reyn gets down on himself for missing an attack, shulk will reassure him, or if he nails a good blow shulk will say "Nice attack!". When tension reaches max dunban will say "We are as one on the battlefield!" followed by relevant rebounds from party members, to name a few. It was dynamic and effortless and it just worked. While some of these lines got repeated a bit as previously mentioned, It helped that they felt natural and it was uncommon for more than 2 people to constantly talk over themselves. Even then the most you could have was 3 individuals talking at once. These lines combined with good sound effects for weapons and grunts made combat loud and active yet tame. At least in comparison to the other titles...
Xenoblade Chronicles X immediately gets louder due to the fact that there are 4 party members instead of 3. However, X installed the soul voice system which was intended to be a tie-in between gameplay and party dialogue. In concept the idea is fine, party members recommend art types for the player to use in order to regain health and raise morale. I would even say it was mostly a success in practice. The only problem is that it gets somewhat repetitive imo. They are often not iconic character lines for like "Reyn time". Instead they are typical military/battle lingo such as "I need some heals" or "Debuff the enemy." However, after you hear "Move in with a melee attack" or "Give me some cover fire" for the 300th time it begins to sound more like Navi nagging you on and on about what to do, rather than natural dialogue. This is more of a personal opinion admittedly, compared to XC2, X is godsend. Despite having lots of repeating soul voices, they aren't that common in each battle, just repetitive after 100s of battles. One negative however was that while you could customize your self-insert character's battle voice lines with hundreds of options, each other party member had only 1 set of lines. However, this could be subsidized by switching up party members. Still, coupled with really loud sound effects and controversial rap music, X battles often sounded even louder than the original. Some might even call it uncontrollable... Seriously though 1 vs X is debatable but It's with 2 that I have most of this issue.
Let us break down the combat dialogue in XC2. There are 3 party members, each with a blade, Plus Azurda, Plus the announcer, Plus the enemies. That makes for a maximum of 8 characters that can speak over each other at a time, besides enemies. While enemies making sounds were obviously a thing in the other two games, I would say it is a bigger deal in 2 because there are more enemies that can speak, with whole game sections dedicated to them (Ardainian soldiers I am looking at you now). This leads to combat getting ridiculously loud as drivers and blades both shout out arts, while Azurda makes occasional comments, and (If he is on) the announcer speaks. On top of that, the game tries to make dialogue between characters return on top of everything else (Eg. We'll beat them with the power of friendship). NOW add all of that in addition to grunts and "yah"s when auto attacks hit and the explosions and sound effects of arts and specials. Needless to say... This is a lot.
I was genuinely upset for a tad when I played through torna, enjoying the conversations between Lora and Jin, until all of a sudden I realized that the loud clusterf*** of sound that was 6 party members would, of course, be returning as well. That's not something I really hold against torna, as it was something the XC2 brand had built up for itself.
For their next game, I hope Monolith makes combat a little quieter or at least takes a step back from the noise that the series has built up to. I should note, this is not really game-breaking, XC is still one of my favorite games of all time, and the chaotic battles are part of what makes the experience.
So what do you all think? Thoughts on which game does this the worst/best, or where you want to see monolith go from here?
Submitted October 30, 2018 at 02:09AM by MilkToastKing https://ift.tt/2qg0tlc
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