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Daniel Ahmad (ZhugeEX): Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is underperforming sales wise. Selling about half of what Remake sold in the same timeframe
- Thread starter amara
- Start date
User warned: Trolling
All people responding to me keep overvaluing non JP VA for these type of games. I just hope the SE realized this and just move forward without it. It is for the best. The little I had to endure of the ENG VA on review videos might as well be AI voice over, and that's being kind.
The fallout from this game would've been mitigate if they did this.
The fallout from this game would've been mitigate if they did this.
Not sure why you think the jpn voice actors are cheaper than the eng voice actors, if you are trying to justify it as a cost-risk. By that reasoning, we could say that the cheapest dub for the game is the only language it needs, the rest can be subbed. ...now that I think about it, seeing a AAA with a spanish only voice track would be interesting.
You have to realize this comes across as a joke. The marketing budget for this game alone is probably 100 times what they spent on voice acting and your here acting like your hot take of only using Japanese VA is how they should save money. You need to understand your anti English VA bias is an extreme minority. It would be laughable for a AAA game like this to ship without it when a hundred other cheaper and smaller games support multiple languages
I really have to wonder if you've actually heard AI voice over for you to say this.
You can prefer subs over dubs and I know I usually prefer them myself. But this is still a wild one, haha.
You should've just said you hate the English VA in the first place instead of trying to frame this as a way to save cost.
If there are customers in a location, you try to sell to them. You don't ignore them and let them just buy your competitors product. You go out and expand your market trying to reach all possible customers. Especially when you're reach stagnant or diminishing returns in your current sales area.
This is not solely a Microsoft problem and considering the costs already to make games, turning away any segment of the population just feels short sighted.
Turns out English VA is likely the most cost effective for the global reach alone. Bye bye Japanese dub.
I will always block/ignore anyone with "did AI write/perform this" take, as they would dehumanize a person based on their performance just to make an argument about video games.
lol by this logic, they should cancel JP voice acting cause the game did even worst there.
Better yet, cancel all voice acting and just have text box.
SNES Final Fantasy supremacy, we should have never increased the production value beyond them,
I think you should stop writing your forum posts in English then and start using katakana if you think English has no more value.
Actually now that I think about it, get rid of the JP VA because it has less value over the English voices that most people are listening to.
I'm a hundred percent the kind of sicko who tries to play most Japanese games with Japanese audio subbed at some point even if it's a second playthrough. Kojima and KH are the exception.
I went to play Remake a second time on hard mode in preparation for Rebirth and got about 2/3rds through in Japanese audio before I switched back to the dub. That's not to insult the original Japanese audio at all it's just a really good dub.
It's really funny because watching cut off snippets in trailers and hitting all the anime grunts I could definitely see how someone could just go "cringe garbage fuck you!" But let the characters talk for more then that and a lot of the anime grunts fade into the background and the dub starts nailing a lot of the nuances of the characters.
When I think of the dub of this game I think of the bit early on in Remake where Barret takes a moment to explain to Clown why people can't just up and move, that systemically many can't, resulting in Cloud actually taking it in and accepting part of Barret's views.
Both the dub actors fucking nail it. It's hard for me to watch older voiced FF7 media now because the new voice actors are so burned into mind already.
I went to play Remake a second time on hard mode in preparation for Rebirth and got about 2/3rds through in Japanese audio before I switched back to the dub. That's not to insult the original Japanese audio at all it's just a really good dub.
It's really funny because watching cut off snippets in trailers and hitting all the anime grunts I could definitely see how someone could just go "cringe garbage fuck you!" But let the characters talk for more then that and a lot of the anime grunts fade into the background and the dub starts nailing a lot of the nuances of the characters.
When I think of the dub of this game I think of the bit early on in Remake where Barret takes a moment to explain to Clown why people can't just up and move, that systemically many can't, resulting in Cloud actually taking it in and accepting part of Barret's views.
Both the dub actors fucking nail it. It's hard for me to watch older voiced FF7 media now because the new voice actors are so burned into mind already.
You can dislike the English VA but it is nowhere near as bad as you're making it out to be. I want whatever you're smoking tbh. It is clear from interviews and the effort that has been put in that the localisation and English VA team really cared about the work they put into the game.
Played Remake and Rebirth in English and Japanese. I've lived in Japan for almost a decade; I've lived, laughed, loved, and lost in both languages, and buddy...
The English version is better.
Just when I thought that Era would never have a meme shitpost as good as those from the other place...you bless us with this.
LMAO
Agreed, if lazy dev rhetoric warrants a warning this one is much worse.
It's basically "lazy dev" rhetoric but with more steps, and that's already penalized.
Would it be bannable to say "wow this shitpost was surely generated by an AI trying to replicate the (I'm an expert) meme" in that case, though? 🤔
Do not tempt fate like this. This is how the thread lasts until part 3 releases.
People seem to be ignoring the absolute mess of its marketing and naming.
I was someone who never played FFVII and only recently started remake because the whole Rebirth naming meant absolutely nothing to me. I had to look it up to see what the hell they actually mean.
What the hell were they thinking with such stupid naming?
I was someone who never played FFVII and only recently started remake because the whole Rebirth naming meant absolutely nothing to me. I had to look it up to see what the hell they actually mean.
What the hell were they thinking with such stupid naming?
The marketing of FFVII is preaching to the choir, cause Square assumed a greater cultural awareness and interest in FFVII than is actual reality. All their trailers are like this as well, kinda full of bizarre non-sequiturs unless you have the context of the original game.
A lot of it is that they took so long to remake it, and overtime it's just lost a lot of momentum. Even when it was announced in 2015 it felt like at that point a lot of people would have moved on after asking for it for so long
Square's strategy the past decade seems to have not really acknowledged a lot of things like this. There's just not a ton of people that are that invested, and sites like Resetera will give you a bit of a skewed impression of how popular the game really is I suppose.
A lot of it is that they took so long to remake it, and overtime it's just lost a lot of momentum. Even when it was announced in 2015 it felt like at that point a lot of people would have moved on after asking for it for so long
Square's strategy the past decade seems to have not really acknowledged a lot of things like this. There's just not a ton of people that are that invested, and sites like Resetera will give you a bit of a skewed impression of how popular the game really is I suppose.
I don't think this is objectively true at all. It feels like trying to work logic backwards to try and explain why the lower sales we are seeing for Rebirth is somehow "just the reality all along" when it isn't. Something about Rebirth in particular has caused unexpectedly lower sales.
It's not that FFVII was never really ever all that popular or that by 2015 people moved on. How do we know this? Simple. In April 2020 when Remake was released, it sold 3.5 million at launch, over a million in Japan. Within a few months it broke 5 million. That's not the sort of results you get if there is no cultural investment at all in FFVII and that people actually don't care other than some vocal minority Era bubble or whatever.
FFVII Remake was very successful. Rebirth has failed to build and capitalise on that, and there are many other factors to look at. Let's not oversimplify it to assume some reality that isn't reflective of results we have already seen.
Maybe a very simple explanation is that Remake wasn't that great to make people buy the sequel at 80€ and the 550€ PS5 that comes with it ?
I personally think that Remake was a very overrated game, especially as I never cared that much about OG FFVII (I played it, it was fine, but I liked FFVI or FFVIII more and these games didn't get nearly the same attention from Square). I would assume that many people are in my case, they played Remake, didn't like it that much, and didn't got out of their way to buy Rebirth at launch, espcially when you know the game will be 50% by the end of the year and probably included in PS Plus next year. And it's not like we were starved on JRPG and/or Japanese games right now (Yakuza 8, P3 Reload, Unicorn Overlord, Rise of Ronin, Dragon's Dogma...)
Maybe if you had some proof we'd believe you. Meanwhile even Yakuza can get extra sales just by adding English VAs to the games (for those that dont like to read subtitles, prefer ENG VAs or have trouble reading subtitles in time).
What your proposing is something I said for one game once... but that was Shenmue III - and that was for two reasons - one the game needed money spent elsewhere, the budget was stretched thin and a 1/3 of the game was cut (fact). Two the ENG VAs are almost all awful, especially the insistence on not recasting Ryo and instead retaining that robot who voiced him in 1&2 in ENG (my opinion).
For a big game such as FF, especially with the first two parts being dubbed, cutting that option will only piss people off. Seems to me that's the last thing Square should be doing, they aint in the poor house, they aint stretching their budget to Shenmue III levels of thin (I assume).
Valid take and I think it is one of the factors already discussed somewhere in this thread. It's certainly true that Remake and Rebirth are quite different and someone not liking how restrictive and small Remake felt would not incline the person to pick up Rebirth.
If you've never played the original FFVII and just recently started Remake, that's...the one you should have started with, right? Like, yes, I know some purists will insist that everybody should have played the original first (and Crisis Core, etc. etc.) but it's good that you started with Remake (part 1 of 3) instead of Rebirth (part 2 of 3). So it seems like...the system worked?
That's the first thing that came to my mind - you can only cash in on nostalgia once. Remake already used up the cultural nostalgia for the original FFVII, so it was always going to be a case of diminishing returns for parts two and three.
Like how Force Awakens made bank by cashing in on the cultural nostalgia for Star Wars, and then subsequent films trended downwards from "stupidly insane amounts of money" to "just insane amounts of money".
SE should have accounted for this.
There are games where I love the Japanese voice acting, but FFVII isn't among them. Ever Crisis uses the Japanese voices and they clash hard with the image of the characters in my head after playing with the dub for hundreds of hours. I'm not joking when I say that if they dropped the English voice cast it would ruin the game for me and I wouldn't buy it.
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I just ignored it for years because I never understood what exactly is happening with it. Didn't even know what Rebirth was until very recently.
So I had to do some research. Not a lot mind you but if you want to sell games especially for a more casual crowd (the vast majority) then this naming convention is idiotic.
Should've been FF VII Remake-2 or whatever. The whole intergrade stuff is just icing on the confusion.
It's also not communicated well that Remake isn't the full FF VII experience, which would be fine, but all I got is that it isn't complete and had no idea that they intended to continue it, maybe calling it Part 1 could've cleared things up.