Novel Themes: Subs and Dubs

When I woke up this morning and went on my computer, the first thing I did asides from going on Swag Bucks to earn daily points for rewards is go on GameFAQs. GameFAQs is a website dedicated to cheat codes and walkthroughs for video games of any kind. It's saved my bacon many times when I needed help with a certain game or unlocking certain items. While it's a great website, you're probably wondering what it has to do with my novel. I'll sum this up with two words: today's poll.

I look at the poll section and find out that today's topic involves whether people prefer Japanese original voice work or English dubbed voice work in Japanese developed games. First place went to subbed work, second depending on the game, and third dubbed. The losers went to it doesn't matter and I never play Japanese developed games. The fact that first place went to Japanese voices cements the issue of subs vs. dubs in my novel further; that there are people who want subtitles and think any dub is inferior to the original voice work. One of the antagonist characters in my novel, Devil's Egotism, represents these people. He labels anything western as 'inferior', speaks Japanese in addition to English to taunt his foes, and is a representation of the arrogant anime and manga fans that think official dubs and translations are inferior.

I wanted to write this blog post because people say that voice work is the make or break part of video games, especially with Baten Kaitos on the Nintendo GameCube. I strongly disagree; I could care less about the quality of the voice work in a game, but if I can't get past a level or achieve a certain completion percentage because somebody in beta testing fell asleep on the job or the developers were really sadistic, we have problems. Mega Man X6 is an example of such scenarios; the game was localized in a matter of one week, and yes a week, not months or years, one week, and it shows. Not only did Capcom USA not bother to dub voice work, which showed how lazy they were, but they didn't bother with lowering the difficulty some. The reason the game is so hard and hated is because of awful level design and the rescue system of the game. To make a long story short, if you fail to rescue a reploid carrying an important upgrade for your character, your game is royally screwed and are forced to restart, unless you cheat and use the god armors, then you might beat it. The controls aren't a walk in the park, either, and if you get stuck in a level, you will get stuck and be forced to suicide all your lives. What was that about voice work ruining a game again?

It's a sensitive topic I wanted to talk about so I don't worry about my day being ruined over a poll. I just hope people will understand what I'm talking about without starting a flame war of sorts. By the way, I won't be talking about the sections of chapters in the novel, but I will be summarizing what happens in upcoming chapters. I'm not going to baby people with tidbits of individual sections.