LogFAQs > #885084313

Raganork posted...

I also remember a lot of the characters being differentiated by strange accents, which doesn't come across too well in a game with no spoken dialogue, largely because reading accents that are spelled-out phonetically is frustrating regardless of medium.

If I remember correctly, that was mostly a translation problem. Because different characters had different accents as a specific Japanese-centric trope used to define character personalities, but which doesn't necessarily translate well into English (in the same way that the Japanese use blood type to help define a character's personality while it means absolutely nothing to Western audiences - see also, "Why do all these games always list characters' blood types?").

It's sort of related to this concept:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheIdiotFromOsaka
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KansaiRegionalAccent

With Chrono Cross, if I remember correctly, the idea was that, because they DIDN'T have a ton of time to define who all those characters were (remember, back then you're still dealing with computer memory restrictions to some degree, and the age of the 80+ hour narrative-heavy RPG was still yet to come), giving some of them distinctive accents was a short-cut to establish who they were to the Japanese audience. "Oh, I get it - that guy is the [insert regional stereotype here]".

It's sort of like if you made a Western game, and instead of giving all of your characters elaborate personalities of their own, you just based some of the less important characters on stereotypes and had talk/dress like Southern cowboys or Californian surfers (oh wait, no, that's Final Fantasy VIII).

To some extent, it's also like reading X-Men in the 80s where Rogue is constantly saying "Ah" instead of "I" and ending sentences with "sugah" to really, really remind you that she's Southern.

I never found it too jarring (especially because the dialogue quirks were usually only on the characters who barely speak all that much), and because I'd seen it used in other contexts before. And apparently it doesn't come across as awkward in the original Japanese as it does in English, which makes it hard to blame the game itself, in the same way that it's hard to shit on the developers of FFIV for "You spoony bard!" or similar awkwardly translated lines.

I agree that it probably would have worked better with spoken dialogue, but that was about one console generation too early for it. And honestly, spoken dialogue isn't ALWAYS better than text regardless (see also, Final Fantasy X).


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