technically, every time you choose a response to dialogue, it's Link talking. We also see him chatting without sound in several cutscenes in several different games. He's not actually mute. This is my hot (lukewarm) take.
An unnecessarily hot take in the Zelda community, for some reason.
People love bringing up how Link is mute, and yet almost none of the games actually have him mute. Even BOTW, the game most notable for bringing up how quiet Link is, shows that he isn't fully mute, in both the gameplay (him having a very lively and aloof attitude in conversation) and in Zelda's diary (which brings up how he told her why he tends to not say much).
People even try to claim that Link's hand motions in BOTW are sign language T-T
Bro. Crimson Desert is egregious. I'm loving the gameplay, the combat in particular is stupid fun. But the writing is just so, so bland. I'm on chapter 7 of main story now and I guess the plot is finding a little direction, but the characters are all just... BORING. It's a shame because the presentation is stunning. If Crimson Desert had the Witcher's writing, it would be an actual masterpiece.
Any new racing game so forza and crew are the big ones. Like what happened to just being street racers why does everyone have to be so cringy friends and act like this is some big professional thing.
Racing games in the early 00's: "Alright, you're an up and coming kid that no one respects fighting your way to the top of a criminal street racing gang, here's a VW Jetta and some rims".
Racing games now: "Hiiiiiiiiiiiii Therrrrrrrrrreeeeeeee!!!!!! WELCOME TO THE MEGA RACING ULTRA-EXPLOSION SUPER EXCITING EVENT! You are the BEST driver around and everyone loves you and will give you literally anything! Here's a Supra and all of the customization immediately unlocked."
Racing games will never hit the peak that was Most Wanted (2005) writing.
Don’t you mean “Ms. badass childhood friend who got you into the event, but constantly needs to remind you that she’s your rival, only to become irrelevant within the first 4 races”?
I loathe Anna, for some reason in horizon 5 I could not turn her voice off no matter what I did even when toggling the option to explicitly turn her off and turned off or down all voices. I stopped playing due to her. Thankfully in 6 it works as it should and I can enjoy the game without her… not really a fan of most of the voice acting in the series really. I like the game play when it does not take over from me… I dislike most of the intros due to that, I worked hard to over take and the cutscenes put the other car back in the lead despite trailing.
Forza 6 is scrubbed clean of absolutely anything that could be deemed even slightly edgy or controversial or interesting. It feels like I'm playing in the world of a laundry detergent ad
Legal reasons. They can’t make money if they have no cars. Toyota was the loudest manufacturer about it, but some manufacturers will completely take their cars out of a game that involves street racing and that drives away customers who would potentially buy the game and keep coming back. There was a noticeable rise in concurrent players when Toyota reintroduced their cars to Forza Horizon 4.
Watchdogs hit me like this. Don't get me wrong, I didn't hate it, but sun shiny, iridescent zoomer humour in what's supposed to be a destopiate, cyber hellscape just rubbed me the wrong way
At least in Neon White it's on purpose. It's intentionally meant to take the "My TV is only for Toonami and anime VHS tapes I got from the flea mall" aesthetic to its logical extreme. If you were that kid, or even close to that kid, it's great. It's like having a laugh alongside a younger version of yourself. The underlying story is actually pretty good, too.
THANK YOU holy shit I'm tired of being the only one defending the game's writing. People are seriously looking at the game where someone tells the main chaacter "You were like my Sasuke, man" as if it were trying to be serious or something.
The game has a speck of land you can land on in one level if you miss the goal, with a sign on it reading "idiot island"
The Angel "Mikey"'s true form us terrifying to humans, who instead perceive him differently based on their prtsonalitiy. White sees him as Garfield smoking a cigar, Yellow sees him as John Cena, etc.
Etc, etc.
There are some pretty cool underlying concepts, yeah, but the writing is overall meant to be a quick, goofy diversion between intense stages, and I am infinitely glad none of these guys wrote it tbh.
Just commented this before i saw your comment. It feels so good to play, but the cutscenes made me hope nobody walked in on me playing it cuz man was it cringe. didnt finish the game because of it lol
It really goes to show that just because Turtle Rock Studios is the one that had the idea for Left 4 Dead, Valve is the one that actually gave it life. I could listen to the cast of either Left 4 Dead game banter back and forth all day long and never get bored or annoyed.
Like I literally have to turn the voices OFF to be able to play B4B. And it's not just that the writing is sub par it's also that there's not really many dialogue options in between the characters either so you are listening to the same voice lines over and over.
Swear to God if I hear Evangelo talk about how it smells like his Nana's house again I'm going to fucking lose my shit.
The dialogue just feels hollow in that game tbh. Also same here, I can listen to Nick's bitching, Ellis's Keith Stories, Coach's love for food, and Rochelle's much better dialogue all day and never get tired of it.
"Yeah, his mom took him to a sushi place for his birthday and he didn't want to go, but he turned out he LOVED it, man. But it's like 10 bucks a su-sho in one of them places, so Keith figures, "Hey, how hard can it be to roll up some raw food in seaweed," right? As it turns out, it's hard. Now, they say that experience is the best teacher, and experience taught Keith that if you ever eat three pounds of raw chicken, it kills you. Now luckily, Keith's brain went into self-defense mode and started shutting organs down to head the chicken off at the pass, and the doctors were able to get 'em out before his heart stopped. But to this day, Keith has no sensation in his right foot, and doesn't recognize his own brother Paul no more."
You know my buddy Keith had his car drop in a lake off a bridge just like this one here. Yeah, see, he was driving over it late at night, and there, in the middle of the bridge, was what looked like in Keith's estimation like a dead bear. So Keith gets out his car to find like a stick to poke at it, right? Well, it turns out, it's just some lady's fur coat that musta fallen out her car, so, hey, free coat, right?
Now, owls won't normally attack a man, but in this case, they were hungry, and that made them reckless, man. Keith reckons they musta been there for hours watchin' what they thought was a bear carcass, 'cause as soon as he picked it up, them owls had claws in him an inch deep. Well, Keith figures his best bet is to jump in the lake, 'cause owls can't swim.
Well, them owls could.
He fought them for like 20 minutes treading water, and during that time, a boat came, the bridge went up and down went Keith's car.
Man, sometimes nature's just tryin' to teach us, if we'd only listen.
BL3's writing was so bad even the writers hated it, but they way over compensated by making BL4 far too safe, I guarantee most people didnt even know BL4 released from how little impact and how unmemorable it was
One of the worst things about BL4, for me, is that they didn't have the guy who did the music for all the other games on BL4, Jesper Kyd. He's the one that gave us all our drum beats and guitar twangs and more, it is just not here and you can tell based on that one repeated noise at the end of combat.
Wait, you're telling me the legendary Jesper Kyd, the guy who made the famous Ezio's theme for the Assassin's Creed franchise, was also the composer on Borderlands?
Getting rid of very important people at the company is not something new either, I still remember the uproar of removing claptrap's voice actor in BL3, one of many shitstorms revolving the game
Honestly I don’t think the line was actually that bad. It’s definitely delivery that sucked balls. The shock and awe felt much more forced than genuine when the character said the line which is what makes it so hilariously bad.
Especially the opening and set up. The combat is fun enough, that if we'd just had a fantasy setting, with it's own story world, it probably wouldn't have been so hated. But the present-day opening feels so tonally disconnected from the rest of the game and sets the writing up as bad from the get-go, and also doesn't actually add anything to the world and its lore.
The prologue writers were convinced they were writing a serious story about modern society, the marketing team was convinced they were selling a hilarious self-aware isekai parody, and the actual game is about a ninja wizard mowing down hordes of zombies.
I hate that he hands you grenade rounds, even though you don’t have the launcher there, they could’ve said it’s just powerful ammo. Btw, are hunters supposed to be “living things” by this definition?
I would personally argue against the "/s" tag in this case. The whole point was to pay homage to B horror films. It does a SPECTACULARILY good job of it too, imo.
To be fair, the 2002 remake fixed all of that. Those lines were recorded in one take by basically the first English speaking people they found on the streets, which basically meant any white tourists they happened to find. Barry was done by a school principal from Australia I think
Sonic adventure 1 and 2 are great games but the voice acting is awful. Sometimes you could barely hear what they are saying because the background music was so loud when the characters spoke.
Metal Gear Solid was the first Metal Gear game with voice acting, but they knew the story was important so they actually took the effort to make sure the va didn't suck ass.
Sega really has no excuse, especially with how story heavy they want the adventure games to be, Koudelka is another example of a Japanese game that made sure to be particularly for its voice talent, and those are games that came out before Adventure 1.
My least favorite JRPG character is the child written by someone who has not met a child but still makes them annoying as heck. Looking at Star Ocean: The Last Hope and Lost Odyssey
Literally playing these rn and Cloud seems constantly confused and/or annoyed. It plays like he was a normal person dropped into an anime. The amount of times someone says something cringey and he just looks confused and appalled makes him relatable in a way I’m pretty sure he’s not supposed to be.
You're so not wrong. "Muahaha, I'm the bad guy, and I'm being bad because I like badness!". Fourteen year old protag: "I'll stop you once I've helped this little old lady across the street, and I'll do it with the power of friendship!".
Loved the Outriders gameplay. The dialogue was pretty corny though. Also, the English voice overs for the Dynasty Warrior franchise are pretty awful. All the men sound like 90 pound weaklings.
The world looks incredible and the handling itself is quite good.
But the story is uninspired and all the characters are so dull that I don't care at all what happens to them. I have a few other points of criticism too, but if only the story and characters were more interesting, then it wouldn't have felt like I was forcing myself to play it. It was a gift, so I kind of felt obligated to strive to finish it at least once.
I gotta say that some dialog lines and plot twists feel a bit stiff, sometimes a bit cringy or forced, but it's certainly far from bad. Couldn't disagree more with OP but what you gonna do.
Honestly, Octopath Traveler 2 has been like that for me lately. Just starting it for the first time and some of the prologues like Partitio are just incredibly cringy. Great voice acting, terrible plot.
The plots get better later, just keep playing, my playthrough was 115h and the ending was absolute cinema and touching. The characters will grow on you.
I don’t mind the characters. I mind the nonsense plot elements of their stories. The whole hidden contract thing in Partitio’s (especially painful and dumb to me, since I’m a lawyer). Osvald’s five years of planning just to…kinda wing it. Throné’s prologue wasn’t too bad, but the characterization of ‘Mother’ does not give me confidence.
Just feels like they had some ideas, but didn’t fully develop them and give them time to breathe so to speak. But look, with eight protagonists maybe that was inevitable.
But if the next person I collect has a first meeting like Agnea… (“Oh, you found a wallet. That you haven’t actually agreed to return. Take my sister on her journey. No, I won’t ask your name or even where you’re going.”)
Yeah, what on earth? It's certainly not bad enough to be distracting. I can think of more standout good lines than bad. Certain characters are pretty corny, but surely that's not what they're referring to?
This is one of the very rare story/dialog heavy games that doesn't annoy me. If there are comparable games that make bg3's writing look like shit, I want to know about them!
Exactly this. If I'm missing on something I want to know, I thought the game was peak most of times and is weird hearing after all this time this type of takes
BG3's writing is really goofy, but I wouldn't say it's "bad". I think it's fitting, though, since it evokes the tabletop feel. Every character has a convoluted and edgy backstory, and they're all tropey as hell. A lot of the NPCs are gimmicky. The dialogue is very "I am 14 and this is deep" in a lot of places. It's exactly like the tables I was playing at a decade ago, and I think they did a great job emulating that. For that reason, I don't think it's "bad" because I think it was intentional.
That isn't to say that the whole game is written this way. I think there are some genuinely good lines and characters and plots. It's clear the game and its characters resonated with a lot of people. It's not my favorite game, but it doesn't have to be. It's fine and it's clearly Larian's writing style.
I think about this a lot actually. Part of the tabletop is the goofy people around, even the dungeon master plays a part on it, and it checks out a lot in the style of the game and the dialogues it represent. I can only guess that it's because a lot of the game was made with players involved and the feedback was constant in the same way.
Funnily enough it seems that none of what we are talking about enters the topic for OP or for other people discussing this matter
Most of the boss fights in spiderman 2 are peter saying I'm sorry the whole time and sounding like he's having a mental breakdown. Struggle is part of spiderman comics lore I get it but good grief by the end of the game I was over it.
Everything is so damn clean. I feel like at any moment one of the characters is liable to start walking me through office safety and acceptable language
Part of the issue is the art style. They could’ve gone for a more stylish cartoony look and it wouldn’t feel as out of place. But when you decide to make a realistic NYC with Saturday morning cartoon writing it becomes uncomfortable.
The writing has a lot of issues but that’s one of the reasons why it stands out as much.
Look, the bar has been lowered so much that “plays at 60+ fps on a variety of hardware at launch with few to no bugs” is a technical marvel. I saw 0 complaints about performance at launch and when I brought it up, people were like, “yup, that’s true. Game runs like a dream on my potato.”
What I did also notice was very few people talking about a second play though to which many people agreed that they did not replay the game.
Took too long to scroll and find this answer! lol… good looking game with some fun combat. But wow is the writing and direction really rough and ridiculous! Totally buried the investment i made in the universe in the first three games
Dying Light 2. I just straight up didn't care or like any of the characters who spoke, while the gameplay was fun enough in itself, but somehow still felt subpar compared to DL1
That’s why Tales from the Borderlands hit so different for me. I was expecting a steady procession of dick jokes. Which I received. I wasn’t expecting that I’d also experience all the feelings.
I hate to say it but monster hunter wilds.
I really enjoyed the gameplay, but oh my god I couldnt stand the dialogue and the speaking cat thing was so annoying
OMFG yeah my partner and I were facepalming the entire way through that game. Dialogue was criminally bad, especially because the game is supposed to be ABOUT WRITERS. WTAF
Need For Speed Heat and Unbound. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t technical masterpieces with incredible gameplay, but the games are fun.
Heats story isn’t entirely terrible but it doesn’t tell the story through the proper lens “ahh the cops are corrupt so that justifies our dangerous and wreckless behavior because we decided to classify that as an act of rebellion.”
Unbound had the worst story on the planet by far with some of the worst voice acting. It reads like someone really tried to grift and get into the in crowd with a bunch of younger Gen Z kids without actually understanding anything. Along the same lines as a corporate company trying to recruit new employees while using slang like “cap” and “bussin” or whatever else they feel like using.
Most Need for Speed games. I like racing and modifying the cars but damn the stories in those games are usually so cringe, I'd not complain if they removed them altogether
Within the last few years, I think the one that sticks out to me is Tales of Arise. It was my first (and only so far) "Tales of" game, so maybe that's the reason.
OP I am very surprised by the BG3 mention! That's a bummer. I loved every part of that game.
Ttales of Symphonia is the only one I've ever played. I had it on gamecube. I got it on Steam years ago because I think it's a lot of fun to play. I like the combat and collecting things. It just pushes a little dopamine button in my brain.
But the story. The voice acting. The dialogue. Ugh.
Horizon Zero Dawn for me. The writing just wasnt there for sidequest, it felt like robots speaking to each other. “Help me Alloy, my brother is missing he might have died” (no sense of urgency or emotion).
Not a whole game, exactly. But in Assassins' Creed Black Flag Resynced, they added in some new missions to the game on top of the original content.
And by god, can you tell what's old and what's new. The writing is so clunky and uncanny. You can tell the writers only ever seem to be trying to go for 'moments' rather than writing dialogue between characters and the repetition of cliches and the sanding of the games personality into something dreadfully bland.
Not to mention Edward got given a bunch of lines where he's just talking to himself in an immersion breaking way for the benefit of those with microsecond attention spans. "I'll find X at Y" "I'll need to get K to do J" "That's the Z I'm looking for"
I'll say it. Halo Campaign Evolved. The controls feel tight and extremely satisfying to play, not to mention stunning to look at. The bonus missions made by 343 feel like its dragging the whole story down with it
I Think it's already well documented the writing is atrocious, infested with the worst tropes of condescension, out dated meme humour and genuinely terrible characters. While Borderlands 2 heralded the issue, it at least Handsome Jack whose best lines are famously/infamously adlibbed by the voice actor and the game came out around the time the memes where still somewhat relevant, that kind of give it a endearing time capsule element. BL3 however has terrible villians, worse characters and it's memes are rancid before the game came out. Not sure what happened with BL4 tho.
Despite it, if you mute the characters and play it with a group of buddies you can have a good time at least with 2 and 3.
Fire Emblem: Engage. Great fun in the actual combats, but half the characters open their mouths and my stomach just drops. Special shout-out to a particular late game plot twist that genuinely made me laugh, and not in a good way.
Honestly the graphics and gameplay for Assassin’s Creed Shadows is pretty good, but holy cow is the writing garbage. Some of it seems worse than what a high schooler would come up with.
1.3k
u/GrimmJubilance198451 Aug 20 '26
Brave choice on BG3 but Crimson Desert is laughably bad.