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Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - Catch All Info Thread

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OmegaDL50

Member
Lmfao I thought people were exaggerating about you but damn this game having a British dub is really that important to you huh?

I'd didn't think anything was particularly wrong with the X dub.

As for the cast of characters namely, Emma, Vandham, Lin, Irina, Gwin, Hope, Nagi, and even Lao, there wasn't anything wrong in how they presented their roles and the work they did.

Not even British VA would safe the Manon from sounding like annoying Chipmunks, and Nopon would be Nopon, even Riki in the original Xenoblade with British VA had the same Nopon style speech mannerisms as well. British VA isn't going to fix those sorts of things.
 

javadoze

Member
As excited as I am for Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I know it in my heart that the tentative 2017 release isn't happening at all, even for Japan.
 

rhandino

Banned
As excited as I am for Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I know it in my heart that the tentative 2017 release isn't happening at all, even for Japan.
Believe~

Would not mind if they put it on 2018 since I still need to finish some Affinity Missions on Xenoblade X T_T
 
They had the same butt shorts that girl is wearing, in XCX. Gotta say, seems inconvenient as I assume a lot of stuff kinda falls into the crack and just gets stuck in there.
 

Seik

Banned
As excited as I am for Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I know it in my heart that the tentative 2017 release isn't happening at all, even for Japan.

The fact that Reggie talked about it as a 2017 release makes me want to believe otherwise....but yeah, I agree with you. :(
 

rhandino

Banned
They had the same butt shorts that girl is wearing, in XCX. Gotta say, seems inconvenient as I assume a lot of stuff kinda falls into the crack and just gets stuck in there.
It was the Candid & Credible Heavy Armor set... a funny thing is that the
Ma-non
based their armors from the anime & manga they found on the White Whale lol
 
I'm not worried about the pants, they will get censored anyway. Story focus! Plus the level design team must be back from Breath of the Wild! I dunno this game could go a lot of ways.
 
Ok... what does this make you think this is not the game they want to make?

Because, say what you want about Monolith's character designs, they've never been this generic before. After the backlash from the fans over the models in XCX, it leads me to believe the more mainstream art direction is a result of the more vocal complaints of the previous game. Don't know why I have to explain that to you, but it seems to me the obvious conclusion. In addition to the fact that I just don't see how anyone could find these characters more appealing or interestingly designed.

Xenoblade has potential to be a successful series, but it hasn't really carved out its niche just yet. So, I see a developer trying new things to solidify the series' identity. Which is good, but I just don't see this as the right direction to go in. At all.
 
I though Seven's design in the original XC was hilariously stupid, but wow, they might have topped it with Lil' Ms. Red. Double wow.

This kinda counter argument really annoys me. Look, the first Xenoblade was anime-inspired, but so was Cowboy Bebop, or Ghost in the Shell, or Princess Mononoke. There's good anime design, and bad anime design, and those in between. Xenoblade was somewhere in between to good, Xenoblade 2's are flat out garbage tier.

Okay garbage may be too harsh, I've seen much worse from NIS and Compile Hearts, but it's still really incredibly generic and coming from a first party production, it just is bad.

Yep, well put. The XC2 faces are really generic, and the outfits are... well... yep. XC at least had a soft painterly look, that was a bit more unique.
 

Tohsaka

Member
The first game probably only had a British dub because there were doubts about it even getting released in America, I wouldn't count on this game one having one. I just want dual audio, don't really care what they do for the English dub.
 
What's wrong with the frontal view?

We can assume where skin surface is based on the back view.

The front view has a shaded piece that only covers part the area from the neck down to the pants, the areas better the straps are all skin. The rectangular boob jacket is absolutely appalling for obvious reasons and do nothing but accentuate the size of her breasts and nipple location and allow sideboob (I shook my head in despair as I typed this)

We dont have clear view of the blonde in any form but in the trailer you can make out their intentions of clearly exposed cleavage in the front shot. Holy hell when I asked for a new character designer it wasn't something like this. Why X 1000.

Let me just say it was very clear from how we only got headshots of the two females in the trailer that they are very careful on managing some of the outrage that will inevitably result form the designs.
 
HmzKyLz.png
At least we get some boibutt too.
 

skypunch

Banned
The first game probably only had a British dub because there were doubts about it even getting released in America, I wouldn't count on this game one having one. I just want dual audio, don't really care what they do for the English dub.

Who decided America had to have its foot in everything? Side UK could easily dub XB2 - they dub loads of big games like The Witcher 3 and Battlefield. It's really not hard to pass the game onto them again.

You really want the same stock American anime voice actors that are used for every JRPG for the thousandth time? I don't want a cookie-cutter anime dub/Tales dub, I want a dub directed by a company that traditionally deals with theatre actors, so they can give the game a different feel and actually sell me on the emotion in these games. I want the emotion to feel real, and not feel like I'm watching a daytime cartoon show.
 

Tohsaka

Member
We can assume where skin surface is based on the back view.

The front view has a shaded piece that only covers part the area from the neck down to the pants, the areas better the straps are all skin. The rectangular boob jacket is absolutely appalling for obvious reasons and do nothing but accentuate the size of her breasts and nipple location and allow sideboob (I shook my head in despair as I typed this)

We dont have clear view of the blonde in any form but in the trailer you can make out their intentions of clearly exposed cleavage in the front shot. Holy hell when I asked for a new character designer it wasn't something like this. Why X 1000.

Let me just say it was very clear from how we only got headshots of the two females in the trailer that they are very careful on managing some of the outrage that will inevitably result form the designs.
If it's anything like XCX, this game will very likely have tons of different armor sets that aren't revealing, so there's no real reason to get upset based on some assumptions you have from art we haven't seen the rest of. I also think it's kind of funny that you seem to hate fanservice so much since you have Otaku in your username. ;)

Who decided America had to have its foot in everything? Side UK could easily dub XB2 - they dub loads of big games like The Witcher 3 and Battlefield. It's really not hard to pass the game onto them again.

You really want the same stock American anime voice actors that are used for every JRPG for the thousandth time?

I don't really care who they use for the dub since I never listen to them unless the game is dub only. I agree it'd be nice to get a different pool of actors, though.
 
If it's anything like XCX, this game will very likely have tons of different armor sets that aren't revealing, so there's no real reason to get upset based on some assumptions you have from art we haven't seen the rest of. I also think it's kind of funny that you seem to hate fanservice so much since you have Otaku in your username. ;)

Not all that consume Japanese media like a madman have to be fans of certain artistic directions thank frankly do not work on international scales. I enjoy Xenoblade for it's focus on modern game design techniques combined with an enjoyable combat system very rarely seen in JRPGs nowadays.

This kind of art direction merely hampers it's market reach, when both previous titles sold better in foreign territories not Japan.
 

Tohsaka

Member
Not all that consume Japanese media like a madman have to be fans of certain artistic directions thank frankly do not work on international scales. I enjoy Xenoblade for it's focus on modern game design techniques combined with an enjoyable combat system very rarely seen in JRPGs nowadays.

This kind of art direction merely hampers it's market reach, when both previous titles sold better in foreign territories not Japan.

As for the bolded, I was just messing with you. I know plenty of people who like Japanese games don't care for fanservice. I don't think it really hurts international appeal all that much, though, since you like said both games still sold better in the west than Japan despite the art direction not catering to the west. Niche JRPGs like this aren't going to appeal to the masses no matter what the character designs look like, though. It's basically just Final Fantasy, Souls (if you count them) Kingdom Hearts and Persona that do big numbers in the west, other series don't sell huge no matter what they look like.
 

wrowa

Member
Talking about writers, I'd love another game written by Koh Kojima. He randomly was in charge of Baten Kaitos Origins' scenario and if I'm being honest, BKO still has my favorite story of any Monolith game. Xenosaga was (overly) ambitious but kind of a mess. Xenoblade had some nice moments and cool twists, but I thought the characters were a bit on the bland side. Xenoblade X had interesting ideas, but by the end it felt like they barely touched the surface of what they initially had in mind. And Baten Kaitos Origins? It's just a nice story that worked really well from beginning to end with great twists and characters.

Thinking about it, in terms of characters it's kind of the antithesis to what Takahashi likes to make. While Takahashi likes to have a huge chast of characters, BKO mainly focused on just three characters and thanks to that I felt really close to all three of them by the end of it. I really liked what they've achieved there.

Anyway, it seems like Koh Kojima didn't write anything before BKO and didn't write anything since then. Instead, he's been the director of Xenoblade and Xenoblade X, so at least he managed to climb up the corporate Monolith ladder, I guess.

... And while I wrote this, I realized once again that I miss Honne as well. Ah, sigh.

Yeah the writing took a hit when Soraya left, some of the best material in those first games are hers. Takahashi is still responsible for most of the themes, concepts and ideas, it's crystal clear, but I'd wager that most of the writing is left to others (and it shows). And since the Xenosaga debacle they've clearly shifted focus: the two Blades are clearly "game first, story second" kind of games. Which is great in it's own way, but with a giant like Nintendo behind them I'd hoped for that interconnected complex saga that they were trying to do since Xenogears.

Instead we a have a self-contained game, a first episode of a potential new series and most likely a spiritual sequel to the self-contained game. Maybe they were burned too much by what happened with Xenosaga, but Jesus....

Well, with Xenoblade they intentionally went into a different story direction, so I'm not sure how much can be attributed to Soraya leaving and to them just following a different vision. (And I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo specifically requested Takahashi to shift to something not quite as ambitious and less obtuse. )

The first game probably only had a British dub because there were doubts about it even getting released in America, I wouldn't count on this game one having one. I just want dual audio, don't really care what they do for the English dub.

NoA had no intention of localizing it, so it became one of the rare cases where NoE was responsible for the English version. Obviously, NoE wouldn't record their dub in the US for whatever reason. That's really all there is to it and I very much doubt that this is going to happen again. Not with the Xenoblade series, at least.

So if Xenoblade X can release from initial announcement to full game in a mere 3 years time. Assuming Monolith is indeed reusing the engine they already made from X and just adding and expanding upon it for Xenoblade 2, then two years is not some insurmountable task.

I'm not sure why you compare the Xenoblade X's time from initial announcement to its release to the total development time of Xenoblade 2. Considering Xenoblade released in 2010 in Japan, Monolith likely already worked quite a while on the game before the initial trailer was shown. Except if you are trying to imply that the time before the reveal was largely spend on creating the necessary tech, but how would we even know that. I think it's more likely that Xenoblade 2 is just going to have a significantly smaller scope compared to the giant open world of Xenoblade X. Which makes total sense, if they go back to the more linear and less open style of the first Xenoblade.
 

skypunch

Banned
NoA had no intention of localizing it, so it became one of the rare cases where NoE was responsible for the English version. Obviously, NoE wouldn't record their dub in the US for whatever reason. That's really all there is to it and I very much doubt that this is going to happen again. Not with the Xenoblade series, at least.

Nothing has been confirmed yet, so I'm still holding out on SIDE UK handling XB2. I think you're wrong to think it's unlikely XB2 will get a British dub.

If it is another stock American anime/Tales dub, then I'm done with this series.
 

rhandino

Banned
I'm 100% serious, mate. It would sully the game for me. I cannot stand stock American anime dubs; I need performances from British stage actors.
dluPna5.gif


Your comments could make anyone that has not played the game that the voice acting in Xenoblade X was terrible
It isn't, specially Elma and Lin
 

wrowa

Member
I'm done with this series, then. Fuck.

Anyway, nothing has been confirmed yet, so I'm still holding out on Side UK handling XB2. I think you're wrong to think it's unlikely XB2 will get a British dub.

Xenoblade 2's will almost assuredly be done by NoA or one its partners and I just don't see them recording the dub in the UK when it likely would be logistically easier to record in the US. While I really liked Xenoblade's dub as well, I don't think that NoA is of the opinion that a British dub would help Xenoblade 2's appeal either. To the contrary, I assume they'd rather be of the opinion that British would alienate parts of the American audience.

Your comments could make anyone that has not played the game that the voice acting in Xenoblade X was terrible
it was not. Specially Elma and Lin

X's dub was fine, but Skypunch is right that it suffered from the "I've heard this voice a billion times before" syndrome.
 

skypunch

Banned
Xenoblade 2's will almost assuredly be done by NoA or one its partners and I just don't see them recording the dub in the UK when it likely would be logistically easier to record in the US. While I really liked Xenoblade's dub as well, I don't think that NoA is of the opinion that a British dub would help Xenoblade 2's appeal either. To the contrary, I assume they'd rather be of the opinion that British would alienate parts of the American audience.

Why would it be harder to record in the UK? I may sound naive here, but surely all you have to do is pass it to SIDE UK?

http://side.com

The game has Bunnits and Tirkins from Xenoblade, there is a focus on a red sword, the XB1 composers are returning, it's a numbered sequel, it's clearly positioning itself as a game aimed at fans of the original, but then NoA swoops in and give it an American dub when the original is so strongly associated with its British voice work and Euro-centric translation? I think that's disgusting.

I understand the American dub for XCX since the the character were from the US, but an American cast really has no place in XB2.
 

rhandino

Banned
X's dub was fine, but Skypunch is right that it suffered from the "I've heard this voice a billion times before" syndrome.
It's that so? To be fair I don't watch that much anime nowadays (and when I do I tend to watch in japanese with subs) so I don't suffer this kind of fatigue.
 

Ridley327

Member
Why would it be harder to record in the UK? I may sound naive here, but surely all you have to do is pass it to SIDE UK?

Logistics, really. It would make more sense for Treehouse to oversee a production in which the VA was recorded in the US than it would in Europe. You don't have to work out time zone differences, and there's less of a "middle man" needed to work with Monolith Soft for feedback on what works and what doesn't.

Of course, that doesn't mean that UK VAs are precluded, as XBX got Adam Howden and Carina Reeves as voices for Cross (and there's no shortage of lines in combat for Cross), but realistically, it doesn't make a lot of sense for Treehouse to go over the Atlantic when a company like Cup of Tea is more than up to the task.
 

skypunch

Banned
Logistics, really. It would make more sense for Treehouse to oversee a production in which the VA was recorded in the US than it would in Europe. You don't have to work out time zone differences, and there's less of a "middle man" needed to work with Monolith Soft for feedback on what works and what doesn't.

Of course, that doesn't mean that UK VAs are precluded, as XBX got Adam Howden and Carina Reeves as voices for Cross (and there's no shortage of lines in combat for Cross), but realistically, it doesn't make a lot of sense for Treehouse to go over the Atlantic when a company like Cup of Tea is more than up to the task.

You don't know if NoA/Treehouse are handling the game. Nothing has been confirmed. It could have been placed in the hands of NoE for all we know.
 

Ridley327

Member
You don't know if NoA/Treehouse are handling the game. Nothing has been confirmed. It could have been placed in the hands of NoE for all we know.

I'm just offering it up as a reason why there wouldn't be a predominantly UK cast.

In any event, NoE has been using more and more of Treehouse's work as a base for voice acting heavy games in recent years, and I think it's pretty telling that for Breath of the Wild, there's just one English VA track, as opposed to them going the extra mile for separate Latin America Spanish and European Spanish dubs. Hell, for Fatal Frame 5, NoE used Cup of Tea for the VA recording!
 
I'm 100% serious, mate. It would sully the game for me. I cannot stand stock American anime dubs; I need the cadence, gravitas, and emphasis on words that only voice work from British actors can provide. It's that Shakespearian touch.
Wait

You do realize there are American Shakespearean actors, right

How far down this ethnicity hole would you like to go
 
I'm 100% serious, mate. It would sully the game for me. I cannot stand stock American anime dubs; I need the cadence, gravitas, and emphasis on words that only voice work from British actors can provide. It's that Shakespearian touch.

Whether you like the dub for XC or not, do you really feel the voice acting was 'Shakespearian' and had the subtleties you describe?
 

skypunch

Banned
I'm just offering it up as a reason why there wouldn't be a predominantly UK cast.

In any event, NoE has been using more and more of Treehouse's work as a base for voice acting heavy games in recent years, and I think it's pretty telling that for Breath of the Wild, there's just one English VA track, as opposed to them going the extra mile for separate Latin America Spanish and European Spanish dubs. Hell, for Fatal Frame 5, NoE used Cup of Tea for the VA recording!

Well, when I think about it, I think Cup of Tea was used in order to get Janice Kawaye back for Ayane. Everything else was done by OMUK.

This'd make sense since I think it was NoE who footed the bill on localisation.

Whether you like the dub for XC or not, do you really feel the voice acting was 'Shakespearian' and had the subtleties you describe?

The acting definitely had roots in theatre/stage acting. The dub was done by SIDE UK who traditionally deals with theatre actors.
 
We can assume where skin surface is based on the back view.

The front view has a shaded piece that only covers part the area from the neck down to the pants, the areas better the straps are all skin. The rectangular boob jacket is absolutely appalling for obvious reasons and do nothing but accentuate the size of her breasts and nipple location and allow sideboob (I shook my head in despair as I typed this)

We dont have clear view of the blonde in any form but in the trailer you can make out their intentions of clearly exposed cleavage in the front shot. Holy hell when I asked for a new character designer it wasn't something like this. Why X 1000.

Let me just say it was very clear from how we only got headshots of the two females in the trailer that they are very careful on managing some of the outrage that will inevitably result form the designs.

This is how I see the design.


Uncolored =/= skin

I don't say this frontal view is ludicrous but may be just me.
 

Xbro

Member
Why are people complaining about a bath scene that won't even make it to the western versions anyway?
/s

Anyway, this girl's outfit looks very familiar but I can't quite place it.
 
She's getting censored in the West, isn't she?
I was hoping with them making this system region free they'd be getting better about that stuff but I guess I shouldn't get my hopes up. I guess I'll have to hope for an Asian English version that will be as close to the original as possible.
 

wrowa

Member
I was hoping with them making this system region free they'd be getting better about that stuff but I guess I shouldn't get my hopes up. I guess I'll have to hope for an Asian English version that will be as close to the original as possible.

Why would those two things even be related.
 

Kyne

Member
Why are people complaining about a bath scene that won't even make it to the western versions anyway?
/s

Anyway, this girl's outfit looks very familiar but I can't quite place it.

blond hair, green outfit, MMO-like setting?

I got u fam.

af0ddfcd30c4b855020816ff76bab11f.jpg
 

jdstorm

Banned
For me i think the best way to determine english VA is Setting

SCIFI IE XCX should mostly be American
Fantasy ie XC should be Brittish
 
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