Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Biweekly Poll - Figures

It's been a long week. :: sigh :: Finally here, though. 273 votes, which I think breaks our record. Lots of votes are yay! Thank you all so much for the votes and the comments - it helps a lot. The poll options are basically the most popular ones I got from the informal survey I ran on facebook and twitter.

Alistair
81 (29%)
Jisei Protagonist/???
74 (27%)
Kuu
74 (27%)
Travis
59 (21%)
Shiro
97 (35%)
Derek
52 (19%)
I'm not interested.
48 (17%)

The comments have all been very encouraging, and at this point in time, I can say that figures are definitely in the future, but NOT the near future. We'll need a larger community, and I'd like to release a few more games before we really get into selling other things. In the end, visual novels are still my main concern right now, so I want to invest in making more of those before other things.

But I am hugely grateful to all of you for your votes and comments. Please do feel free to leave your thoughts still, as I always want to know what you're thinking.

--

New poll up, and it's fairly self-explanatory. Do you prefer your games to be voiced? Assume that the quality of the voices is pretty much the same as the voices in Jisei. I know some people love voices. I know some people turn them off no matter how brilliant they are. What are your thoughts?

4 comments:

Little Ramyun said...

I finally thought of a good example of what I enjoy. Layton has just enough voice over for me. I do very much enjoy the voice over, but I would definitely be skipping it if it were for every line.

Tale said...

I agree to Ramyun - HQ voices like in Jisei are absolutely awesome (I love them and listen to everything) but I know that some people skip them, which is a shame - Layton is great, but so is TWEWY (occasional SFX, random phrases, sighs, surprised noises etc)

Whiner said...

*Really good* voices add a lot to a game - especially when it comes to emotional moments. You can communicate things with a noticeable vocal tremble that are much more awkward to get across in text.

But I read much faster than people speak. Playing Japanese visual novels, I have the voices on, but I'm usually forwarding through the lines without letting them complete them, until it gets to Critical Emotional Moments where I actually want to hear the inflections.

Mediocre voices are mostly useful for people who don't want to have to read... and those people wouldn't be playing these games.

Anonymous said...

I LOVE voices. And Jisei's HQ voices are great.

However... unfortunately... it's still not on the quality of the seiyuus in Japan.

So for me, here's what I would like if there are voices: the price remains roughly the same $15-$20 (I wouldn't mind if the difference between 2 equally length game, one voiced, one not, by $5. BUT NEVER EVER have a "voice pack". I WOULD NEVER pay for that. Just saying.), the voices are good (Jisei-quality's fine), and the game gets released at roughly the same time. xD

I think they really "complete" the emotions of VNs, but I don't know if we're there yet. And I do think that if it ends up costing you a lot more, you might really want to cut it out and reimburse with A) longer length & excellent sound effects (think TWEWY) or B) have voice overs in love critical moments.

One critique I DO have: I'd like the protagonist to have voice overs too. I know that's not how some Jap VNs do it but it's a little jarring to have it for everything and then...