@@kyotheman69 having played SWTOR, i can tell you that voiced responses can actually ruin the story even if the voice acting is good, because there's a bigger chance of the character saying something in a way you weren't expecting. FF14 is better without voices
He had done a few like that but at least half have that dreaded cash shop focus. Or kinda worse Didn't have a cash shop at first but git bought out by the company that shall not he named and had the shop added for whale hunting
Overall you can't even judged it in the moment, since the non chinese versiojn is in a giant catch up rush. Many problems come from that, everything is going so quickly, you got new dungeons and raids pretty much every 2-4 weeks and item level also escalates, while more problems are created by the breaking down to earlier levels to somehow fit, what for example isn't good for balance. Not really a super good idea, at least not working all too well, but how good or bad the game is will be the question at the end of this catchup when it's really the actual, current game, not old, reversed stuff - and it will also be very interesting how the complete rework with the new engine will work out. Overall something absolut rare to see, that a developer re-creates his game witha new engine, near to no developer pushes so much work into a game.
If you ask me, the voice acting is the most realistic in any MMO I've ever seen. No one is coherent, everyone talks over each other, their own idea of what was said doesn't even line up with what they articulated; it's refreshing to see an MMO be so ambitious as to perfectly capture your average trip to a Wal-Mart
I mean, even the player characte dies and comes back - it's not really something you want to do, thogh, since it is quite an effort to lead something back and very risky.
I am a voice actor that gets cast in these kinds of projects. Can say, they give you little or no direction, and around 80% of the info given is in Chinese. The people involved are mostly young actors that are extremely excited to be a part of a videogame, it is a really positive community :) If you want a primary source about eastern localization VO feel free to hit me up xD
Hey buddy! I'm quite intrigued by your comment's last section! I'm a Chinese-Hunarian mixblooded person, with atleast c1 level of knowledge of English and soon will receive my HSK5 certificate. If there's gonna be a new project, then I would gladly join it.
@@germansausage7310 I think a really good voice actor could manage to deliver a line or two really well even if the director is dog shit. Of course the company should be thinking about doing stuff well with actual professionals but I digress.
Very honest when it comes to game, no? I mean, how often do you have such a scene and then can just do something else instead? Hell, FF14 for example got it as part of the story itself. "You must stop that dragon (in the north)! Now travel to that country south, someone wants to talk there to you about something, whatever".
To be fair to this game, this is a really good representation of the wuxia/cultivator style of manhua/webtoon/story. It's utterly incomprehensible, throws around nonsense at every moment, people refuse to do any work when they can pass it off to a subordinate and nobody who's actually anybody shows up or does anything because they're all busy doing something else. To note on the classes being gender specific as well, though not really discussed in the video, in wuxia stories, men contain Yang energy, which is typically associated with fire, aggression and combat type abilities, while women contain Yin energy, which is usually more esoteric like healing, ice or sound. Normally in these types of stories, males can't learn Yin powers and vice-versa because it's incompatible with their energy. So while weird, it does make sense for the genre for classes to be gender locked.
That is pretty ancient concept which is rarely used in most of Chinese games now.Most mainstream idea is both male and female are balance between Yin and Yang. It is just one has more leaning to the other; but doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive to one and other. Moreover, this game doesn't play this rule either. For example, Summoner is learning Yang style spells while Reaper is Yin style spell which is part of their lore. However, neither of them is gender locked. (The Grandmasters for both of them are male ) Furthermore, Wu Zhao clan is pretty close with concept of Yin, yet they do contain both male and female. The only gender-locked classes are Floral Palace duo, but Yin and Yang is not the logic they split.
I mean what if the tree was some sort of guardian tree that kept evil spirits from infecting people and turning them insane to kill everyone? I'm sure there's a reason lost in the uh... interesting... English translations in the game.
The overlapping cutscene dialogue is most likely due to the lines being shorter in Chinese but the cues for them not being adjusted to compensate for the new length.
Yea I was gonna comment the same thing. Can tell especially when they switch to Chinese after saying the same thing in English you can tell how quick it is comparatively
Same for the overlapping GUI buttons I bet. They're bigger then originally programmed due to english using more letters. (I mean, you COULD program your GUI in a way that adapts dynamically to the buttons content but looks like the budget for that went to marketing).
I have a friend who used to get mad and speak......whatever the voice actor of Amy Wong from futurerama spoke when mad. He just literally quoted her outbursts verbatim. He had a perfect memory for sound and did voice acting. His kids told me they knew they were introuble when their 50 year old very Irish father started to sound like a 20 something Chinese woman. To be clear he got mad and started speaking a language he doesn't understand but would be understood by a true speaker of the language......both impressive and kinda dumb to put that much effort in to that lol
This MMO plays like a D&D campaign I was in, years ago; The DM was so scared we'd win any boss fight against her precious boss NPCs that **every boss fight** had excuses and railroaded mechanics to sideline us. Then we got to sit back and listen to her loving describe some other NPC she made coming in to save us, every time. It was the equivalent of a combat cinematic for D&D. At one point, we told her we were fighting the boss ourselves, or quitting. We ended up winning and, as I am about to kill the biss (Who was a minion to the real Big BNad, not even the Big Bad himself); She vetoed it. Just 'No, you find you can't kill him. Your body won't move.' Then the minion (It was not his turn yet): Knocked me out (No save allowed), cast a spell that pushed the party 50 feet away (No saves allowed), and teleported away. All in the same round of combat, while it was not his turn. You stopped playing in that campaign.
I was watching this on my laptop and when you said, "I talk to this character's boobs..." my wife looked up from her Switch and then we both started laughing when you called her out on it. Thank you for that moment, Josh. :)
This just shows that the "big L" on the dev company are the team charged with the audio and sound design of the game. They can't even edit a take from a VA, probably the VA says the line a couple of times so sound engineers edit and cut-off the parts they don't want and keep the lines that fit the best, instead they just put the entire unedited audio file into the game. You can see that this isn't the only audio issue with the game, so yea, VA aren't exactly the best for sure but the sound design team made it 100 times worse.
The animations are timed for the original Chinese audio clip length which are usually faster than English. So instead of adjusting either the animation length or matching the audio timing they just replaced the audio files. This is what happens :)
Just a note about the strange story: this is straight up a Xianxia novel transposed to videogame medium. That's why every somewhat important character is considered a massive badass with "super powers"; every character worth giving a shit in a Xianxia novel is super awesome and powerful and talented. So for a eastern, most likely chinese audience, this kind of story is more common, and therefore more acceptable, than to a western one simply due to cultural factors. The 70s martial arts movies you reference are in fact based of Wuxia novels, which share many tropes, but are more focused on real/martial arts aspect of awesome heroes (similar to the western Arthurian Tales or The Song of Roland) rather than the spiritual aspect.
Some Wuxias can be fun to read, though they're a little ruined by the main character always having god level plot armor (or else the book just ends lol), but I can't imagine them being a coherent game for westerners. Too slow paced, so so many cultural differences, and more tropes than you would think are possible.
The only good Xianxia/wuxia webnovels I've read were the ones that didn't dead ass focus on cultivation, but rather, the characters. The power trips were there, but they were the side dish. The vast amount of CN MC's apathetic to the people around them made me apathetic to the world they live in. Why this is so prolific in CN novels I'll never understand.
Even in this case, I would have to think that only being able to watch the cool things and not do the cool things must’ve been boring on both sides of the pacific.
It's cleary a high fantasy setting. As new character you are already special, an immortal = somehow who surpassed normal human limits, but this still means shit, because this goes far further. What's actually makes it interesting. You ARE special. but you are not the unique chosen one super sue the whole universe spins around.
What's weird about the voice acting being so bad is that their pronunciations are all consistent with each other, so there was clearly active direction of the actors.
I've heard this said about movies, but I think it definitely applies here too: if there's one bad performance, it's the actor. If every performance is bad, it's the director.
I opened Josh's Twitch in the background while I was watching this because he popped into the premiere chat to say he'd be going live soon. It started autoplaying the vod from his last stream. It took me a good few minutes to realise the two overlapping Josh voices weren't just a joke about this game's sound balancing.
Like, I get the intent here. They clearly wanted to make it clear that bad guy was using compulsion magic to make other guy take the evil sword and be evil. Sure, whatever. It just... wasn't really sold all that well.
@@webbowser8834 Yeah, but it was edited and voiced incredibly poorly. Like, they could have made it at least seem like the other guy was struggling, put some effect in the "you will" to have a "dark powers" effect.
I played a bunch of this game at launch and really enjoyed it, mainly because of the visuals. I also played the game with fully Chinese voices and relied on the subs to get everything, it's a lot better that way, unfortunately. I agree with pretty much everything you said here, there's a reason I'm not still playing. But I did want to point out one thing you said that was wrong. In the first dungeon it changes your visuals, not your gear. It's a purely cosmetic thing. I still hated that part of the dungeon, especially since I picked up a few costumes and those get overridden as well. But you do go through it using the equipment you have earned unlike what you said. Also, it is the only dungeon in the game that does this. Still a really bad way to introduce players to dungeons because it doesn't just change your gear visuals, but your face as well, and in a game where visuals are the main selling point... That seems like a bad idea.
Whenever I see games like this I feel really bad for the 3D artists who've spent thousands of hours carefully modelling, texturing and building the world, having no say on how the game should play.
I'd only feel bad for them because their work got butchered in this localization. From what I know the game was well received and enjoyed where it was made.
@@MrInsiipid the Chinese voice acting isn’t nearly as bad. And the sound is probably much better. I think the reason why there is so much overlap is because the actual Chinese voice lines were shorter, so when they put in the English voice lines, they were to long.
@@alpha_9997 Yeah, the book style that the game is based on have the same problem. What is one or two sentences in chinese becomes a page long paragraph in english.
when this game came out 2 weeks prior i lost my left tumb and index finger, one of my buddy's bought this game for me to cheer me up, i no lived like mad the first the 2 months i was in the top 100, it gave such a rush. during that time period i was pretty depresed lost my job, felt worthless thought about suicide alot those days,couldn't use my left hand anymore but this game gave me new friends and some of them helped me see the bigger picture again, i quit the game and came outside again this game saved me in a weird way.
It’s amazing how sometimes mmos have that affect. I’ve been there, different causes though. Once you get past the struggle a bit you lose desire to play the game
So your friend saw that you lost a thumb and and index finger and said " hey let me see how well you can still use WASD" Your friend's a dick lol...glad you pulled through though
@@Toshi3.71 i get what you mean, i was afraid to use my hand it helped cross certain barriers in my head, funny enough you learn pretty fast to cope with missing fingers. At first i was also like wtf why you giving me an mmo for dipshit :p
Let me remind everyone of something. We pretty much had to BEG the devs to let us change to the original Chinese language because, originally, it was going to only have English for our version and ABSOLUTELY NO ONE WANTED IT.
Are there any mods or anything that make the story coherent (For non chinese linguists)? I do have a soft spot for wuxia stories, and while the cutscenes did it no favour I can see that world building in this mmo might be kinda good.
@@Youboremenow It has subtitles... they will be at a similar level of quality to 99% of wuxia you read. The story is also around the quality of 99% of wuxia you read. A solid "why"/10.
Im srry but a women character that is voice acted by a man who didn't even wanted to try a high pitched voice to remotely sound like a women? That is quite bad unless you have an even worse example than this 😂
You know what, I pre-ordered this, then before launch refunded it to purchase at a later date. During the refund, the support team said "Once you refund you wont be able to rebuy the game", I lol'd and said okay that's fine. I think support team was helping a homie out.
How did the Devs get away with this? Everyone involved in and in charge of the voice acting, translation and subtitles should never be allowed to work in localisation again
@@cartoonishidealism582 The localisation clearly wasn't done by the Chinese developer though. This is a western company either doing the absolute bare minimum or actively mocking the media they're being paid to translate because they know the Chinese company can't tell or won't care.
This is the first "Worst MMO" Josh has reviewed that I actually want to try. The too funny voice acting, beautiful graphics and the fact the game isn't pay to win was enough to try it.
"Then this voice actor delivers his lines with so little energy if he were any more relaxed he would be medicly dead." This line made me laugh so hard i almost died
What's funny is that particular clip, had average kind of OKAY level voice acting. It sounded like a character at least, instead of 1970s Kung fu voice dubs
@@Grandmastergav86 while anime is really big in Asia like One piece considered a kids show in there. It doesn't make much a impact in western(because their trending is currently tiktok or some sh*t) and even they did,they usually watch by themselves and don't want to share to their family.
I remember the one time I finished a pen. It felt amazing. I looked back at all the ink I had poured over many notebooks. Years of constant writing and impeccable reporting. Truly, one of the greatest achievements of my life. You must be proud.
I had such high hopes, I love the Chinese fantasy setting and those games rarely get translated to English ... I was so disappointed. Feels like the game would've been much better if they skipped the English VA and used that money to do a better job at translating instead.
I remember a time when MMOs were first starting to be voice acted, and a lot of the dialogue you still had to read because they didn't pay enough voice actors. But then I hear this game where they got so many of them talking at the same time. We've gone full circle. I guess I prefer quality over quantity.
I also would prefer quality. I'm okay with voice acting only being in cutscenes and important moments if it's well done. Bad voice acting through the whole game can ruin it, I'd rather just read walls of text
@@ImaginaryAlchemist Even in the early days i wished voiced NPCs would shut up lol. I remember launch week of EQ2, roaming through the city of Qeynos hearing NPCs shouting through the walls of their respective buildings. I still have what they shout stuck in my head 'MY WIFE MAKES THESE DELICIOUS CRUNCHIES! I WANT MY CRUNCHIES!" lol
I started with EQ and like so many I just wanted Fippy Darkpaw to speak out his reincarnation number but knew I would get tired of the repetitive nature soon if they actually did that. I went from no voice acting to now and I really like quality acting from key characters and little to no voices from background npcs especially In hub towns
I feel like Gameforge will see this financial failure as affirmation that p2w is the only profitable model instead of realizing that this game failed because of poor execution. Plenty of people will pay loads for only cosmetics if the core game is actually good. Just look at Path of Exile. Edit: To be fair, PoE's stash tabs are debatably p2w.
I'm fully convinced they torpedoed the game on purpose specifically for this reason, the same way Disney sabotaged Treasure Planet because the animation techniques used to make it were high-effort and expensive.
1 person spent $700,000 on Lost Ark in Korean version. how many players in PoE have to spend money to reach this number? to do 1 upgrade after +20 = $30 and the chance to succeed is 3-1.5% and you have 6 parts of gear to upgrade. Genshin Impact made $1 billion from microtransactions in around 6 months. GTA 5 also make billions per year. sure in PoE players pay loads of money for cosmetics, but in p2w they spend unfathomable amount of money. guess which 1 the developer will choose to make money?
@@SapiaNt0mata the amount spent doesn't mean a thing, p2w is p2w. if i had to spend one cent to get access to the strongest gear in the gear immediately it's p2w. the only reason a person would spend alot of money on something is because the person likes the game.
@@hovsep56 you missed the point. the amount of money players spend does matter. someone spent $4,000 at once to open the lootboxes of Genshin Impact. how many people have to buy cosmetics to reach $4,000 that 1 player spent with 1 time spending? that's the point for the amount. someone that spends $700,000 means he/she likes the game, otherwise that person wouldn't spend even $1
@@SapiaNt0mata it does not matter at all, a game can be cheap and still be p2w hence my example of paying one cent to get the strongest gear in the game. you still PAID a amount to win. the size don't matter. it's called p2w not pay x amount to win
It's startling to think that this game may have actually done better in sales and player retention if they had removed the voiceovers in their entirety.
@@gh0rochi363 sorry for replying to a dead comment thread, never realized anyone replied to this. I speak both and read/write Traditional Chinese. Albeit English is my main/better language, and always has been. In fact my Chinese standards has arguably taken a dive in recent years ever since I moved to the UK 🤣
Its clear the animation was timed for the original voice actors and they didnt go back with the dub to retime anything. Its the reason a lot of chinese games just dont get western dubbing because the time span for speech over the amount of information is RADICALLY different.
A lot of people fail to notice this, so they just complain, and that's understandable. But, people also are lazy and don't read. It's much more immersive to just use native voice settings and read subtitles, if you can watch anime with subs (which you should, if you don't your a heathen) you can easily over look 70% of the complaints in this video lol
I prefer subs 90% of the time and started MMOs with evrrquest so issues with text here. I went to school for multimedia and game design so oh this game was handled brings up a lot of red flags. Instead of a planned out localization its like they just had an AI try to split the difference between the two
@@raijuko BS excuse for their laziness. Also I tried this and some cut-scenes were so poorly timed that this doesn't work because it would cut away before they even finished talking. Makes me think you didn't even play the game you're defending.
"The classes are genderlocked and you have access to the 3 genders: Man, Woman, and Small Girl." If I had a nickel every time I saw an Eastern developed MMO that could fit this exact description, I swear to god.
@@Negritis I'd say "Fair enough" and "I understand" if it didn't keep happening. Consistently. With the obscene majority of MMOs from that region. Blade and Soul Black Desert Online Lost Ark Tera MapleStory Bless Online / Unleashed And those are the ones that, as far as I know, are still in operation along with this game. And it's hardly an exhaustive list. And feel free to make any number of excuses defending the choices made. Contrived lore reasons invented by the same developers making these choices, cutting developmental cost, using hetero sex appeal to sell their game in an oversaturated market, doesn't matter. But at the end of the day, it has been done so much by this specific region of the market that it's become a meme and it's going to be hard to wash that stink off. For me to have any interest in any MMO from that region, the very first thing I have to check is, granted, the MTX abuse, but the second thing is if there's gender locking and how bad it is. Because it's a massive problem.
@@SpellboundTutor I'm not saying it isn't, I'm saying that out if 8(7 if we say the 2 warrior is one) classes only 3 (1) has gender lock I'm not a fan of it either, but Josh did disservice to the game with saying it's gender locked implying a full lock which isn't true The new class also won't be locked afaik
I did try this game when it became f2p on steam and one of the first things I did was to change the voice from English to Chinese and it did change the experience for good. Some of the things that made me lose interest were: First: For some reason no one wanted to do dungeons which were supposed to be one of the main sources of gear from what I understand, and while you can do the first dungeons with those companion npcs, at some point you are forced to do it with other people, people that didn't want to do them so I hit a wall there.. Only thing I can think of is that maybe most of the people that play are already max level and don't have time or will to do those other lower level dungeons. Second: Even if you ignore the dungeons, you can still advance in the story and hit student level 1 which is good and I did. Big problem is however that when I hit that student level, I got a box with gear and was sent to some area to continue with the cultivation/student quest thing. The gear on that box was level 130 or 140, I can't recall the exact level but I am pretty sure it was more than triple the level of my older gear, so you may think it was decent gear to faceroll older content and be able to quest normaly in the place they send me in order to at least be able to farm end game gear with other players which are probably all playing in those higher level areas right? Well wrong, turns out that even with the gear they gave me the, experience in that area was totally different... Basically each mob in that area felt like a mini boss from one of the dungeons, so a quest that should take like a minute would take like 10 or something since each mob had tons of life, hit like a truck and had massive defense, if you add to that the companion npcs that have like a 10 minutes cooldown glitch like 90% of the time on the open maps and just stand there as my character was obliterated by garbage minions, at some point I just lost my patience and stop playing the game. Don't get me wrong, maybe there was something I miss between the main story quest that levels you to student leven 1 and that garden area or whatever in which I was too weak to play. But thing is that aside from dungeons than no one wanted to do and that only seems to drop gear way lower level than that box they gave me, plus some daily demon hunter quests.. I didn't find a way to get gear strong enough to survive in the area I was sent to, and since that was the only thing that the game was leading me to do I just got bored... Heck I even search for youtube videos on how to gear up, but all content was from like a year ago when the game was not f2p, so it was partially obsolete I guess..
Devs: "We made an mmorpg with no pay to win! You're welcome." Players: "Awesome! Does it have good storywriting?" Devs: "No... but lots of cutscenes!" Players: "Oh, ok, but is the voice acting decent?" Devs: "Oh god no." Players: "Hmm, how's the combat?" Devs: "You one-hit bosses." Players: "...and the quests?" Devs: "You'll get to fetch stuff, and it's only 10 feet away!"
Not the only MMO that has a fetch quest where the items are 10 feet away, thats the trope of all MMO. Except for one, New World, where they make you walk all the way to the other side of the map to fetch something to come back and then go all the way back to get the item that was next to the item you just fetch them.
@@suiker1224 No matter who to blame. If a game can't even get translation and UI adaptive right. Do you still think they actually care about the game..........and These game company are mega rich asses. They literally can just smash money to make everything works
In a moment of weakness in my life, I applied as QA tester for this game. Luckily, my salary expectations were apparently too high, so when they realised how much a professional tester costs, they changed the advertisement from "senior QA tester" to "internship". I'm sure that whoever they hired, they reported some of these bugs (they are impossible to miss), but GF simply didn't care to fix them. It's a pity when years of development are ruined by a very poor QA. This is not Cyberpunk 2077 or New World, but still, it could have probably been a better game.
I did preproduction in the US on this game prior to GF being involved. Simply put by the time it is released to us they aren't going to make many changes for the US audience or worry about bugs *unless* it does well. See something like ArcheAge. Their main hope is to make a bit of side hustle cash so to speak. The risk vs reward of putting that much effort in and it will likely fail is high.
Oh no... I was so hyped for this game when it came out preordered to play the beta and everything, I'm just really into xanxia. Played everyday for the first two months and was part of some of the first groups to clear jade palace, first raid. Then my friends started getting tired of doing dailies with little progress and I was left alone, could only stand it for another month for I dropped off. Had a lot of fun now time to see if it gets torn apart lol! Edit after watching: It sucks so bad that the actual combat depth of the game only really starts after you hit max level ( student ) and can access the none beginner difficulty for dungeons. The encounters are genuinely fun and challenging at that point and it makes the fact that the story is one huge tutorial that much more painful. On another note the instance you did has a plot reason you look different. See if you read the journal entries those 'demon' looking people are called nocturnal spirits and they used to look human until some corruption changed them, the instance is a flashback to a battle that took place with an enemy army before there corruption and your playing as a group of nocturnal spirits still in their human forms. The reason they called you humans from wuzhao is that is where the nocturnal spirits originally came from. Another note is this game is heavily inspired by Chinese Xanxia stories which is basically Chinese mythologies own version of western fantasy and has many of its own tropes and the such. So while the plot is really ruined by many of the translation and voice acting errors playing this game without knowing anything about the genre is akin to playing a western fantasy game without knowing what a wizard or a dragon is, hence a lot of the context your might be assumed to have, weapon spirits, expert level fighters usually being able to fly, cultivation tropes, are lost since the genre assumes you have some baseline understanding of how the genre usually handles those things All in all this game just makes me sad everytime I see it as I had 200 hours of incredible time at launch with it, and even wrote a shitty dungeon guide for it, any really appreciate the none p2w commitment they went with. Ultimately the game will probably die a slow death in the west unfortunately, such is the fate of average MMORPGS
Actually the problem of "Humans from Wu Zhao" line is the "humans" part. As you said, the incident took place prior to their corruptive transformation; hence both Wu Zhao people and the rival clan were just people at time. "Human" is not approprite term to use, that would imply at least one or the other was not humans. Moreover, by the time corruption happened, both of the clans transformed. "People of Wu Zhao" is more appropriate phrase.
@@yucheng4947 And that is the level of nuance in translation that requires translators that speak both languages and understand both cultures to find an equivalent that carries the letter and the spirit.
Sorry in advance and just a tiny tiny nitpick here, "仙侠" is written as "Xianxia". It is always lovely to see Westerners who are into Chinese mythology and being able to share the same wild imaginations, just like how we share the vision of dragons and dungeons. Unfortunately, the diversity of cultures results in difficulty in localization, which can be also observed when many classical Western MMORPGs failed in the Chinese market.
I loved this, especially the overlapping audio at the end. The Raids / combat at end game are seriously fun but it is basically a dead game. For how beautiful it is and the effort the initial developers put into the game, gameforge really botched this localization.
What if you did the whole descriptions-of-actions-in-text thing but then also animated really detailed scenes where they just do something different. Like the narration says "he slaps you on the shoulder" and instead you two shake hands. I feel like you could have a lot of fun with that as a designer.
18:00 reminds me of one of the first quests in Blade & Soul where a healer says one of his patients will be paralyzed for life because he doesn't have the medicine he needs and no one is available to help. But the medicine is obtained by running to the beach less than 200 feet away.
wow, crazy that you posted this. I was JUST thinking yesterday, "I wonder when Josh is going to cover SOLO." I had been wanting to play for a long time but didn't want to buy it, so I've been playing it the past few days now that it's free. It's definitely not for everyone, but I'm enjoying it so far...in part because I used Chinese VO from the start, and the storyline playing through Fox Mage is actually pretty interesting. edit: now that I'm watching further, I'm honestly blown away by how different the story is when you're not playing fox mage. it's like a totally different game. it seems like the storyline for the older classes is way more confusing and unpolished.
Yeah all the awful voice work and subs aside, the story for the new classes is decent. Here's the problem: that story ends after an hour or so, and then you're just right back into the dull-as-shit main game. It's basically just a separate prologue.
Expansion classes skip the first few zones to have a shorter story. Both of them merge at Chang'an, or couple small quests before that in Zhongnan but you only get a couple small quests to lead you to Chang'an and the actual zone of Zhongnan is left for later.
Well, we're getting a heavily condensed version of the original game that's been going for years in China. Even at launch, the leveling experience was considered bad in China, and it's only gotten worse since then. Developers simply didn't want to put too much time into it, and it was never revamped to a serious degree outside of shortening it, and making the content easier and faster.
Actually the storyline of Floral Palace duo is slightly more confusing than the older ones, because canonically their storyline begins at Ch 10 ( that’s why you cannot play chapter 10 as fox mage) their storyline is not getting together at the end of chapter 9 .
This is the first game in your entire series that actually made me _angry_ during its cutscenes. I'm honestly kind of impressed that it managed to transcend simple mediocrity and low effort and instead create something so unexpectedly and genuinely irritating. I would have probably alt+F4'd the game midway through the cutscene at around 20:00 and immediately uninstalled it on steam, and then removed it from my library. What an absolute atrocity. Forcing someone to watch all these cutscenes should be classified as torture.
@@ROCKNROLL947 Maybe FF14 isn't your thing, maybe it actually is bad (I haven't played it so I don't know), but it can't possibly be as bad as this. This right here is art. The dialogue is full of proper nouns that are unknowable to anyone except perhaps fans of the show, the translation seems to have different definitions for the same exact words which the voice actors read with zero thought or comprehension so even fans wouldn't understand it, lines are getting cut off and overlapping because they took too long to say in English and the whole cutscene is clearly a prerecorded video with zero allowance for longer voiceover from characters. Of course the subtitles don't match up with the voiceover, but in this case it's the least offensive part of this auditory crime against humanity. This is so bad, it would get chewed out if it were a middle school group project, but it's supposed to be a $40 game with AAA graphics. This isn't mediocre, it's mega awful.
One big problem I have with a lot of chinese wuxia themes (anime, manhua and games) is there is often this idea of, "special people are special and ordinary people are not, unless they were but it was somehow hidden, so technically they were special all the time." I'm from Taiwan, and this kind of thinking seems kind of insidious to me. Almost like they want people to think people who are well off were always chosen to be special etc, and the normal peeps can just be background characters in their own lives.
@@Jokoko2828 But it's not because they're special. They're made of the same stuff as the rest of us. They're only wealthy by circumstance. The trope here is that there are "special people" who *really are* different from ordinary folks, and that's not true in real life at all.
@@imperiallarch7610they aren’t different because they’re special, they’re special because they’re different. Being wealthy is the thing that sets them apart.
"I'm now having a conversation with this characters boobs making everyone who was listening in the background pay attention now." Never been so called out in my life.
If I were to guess, I'd say that the VO and the subtitles are different because two different teams were localising them with nobody cross-checking the result. This genuinely makes me wonder whether MMOs like this are a laundering scheme...
This isn't an uncommon thing in general. Most of the time the reason this happens in DVDs/Blu-rays is because the subtitles are meant to be more literal translations while the voice acting makes changes to fit the mouth movement. In a game like this, most likely they didn't finalize the written script by the time they scheduled the voice actor recording sessions. I'd imagine it mostly boils down to they had very tight timeframes to get things done either because of overconfidence in their own abilities or a management pushing for a deadline either for shareholder or marketing purposes.
This is completely the case, and it's clear that they were working without any context in quite a lot of cases where they get the gender of the characters talking wrong.
My guess is rather voice overs take a lot longer than text translations so they had to send something over to a company that did that for them without the actual translations beeing ready. It's the reason not a whole lot of dialogue is or was voiced in FFXIV because you can't really alter the story and dialogues when voice actors are already working on it
They probably thought "the game is already done how hard can it be to rerecord the lines in english" and just did not bother to check the quality at all
When I first found out about this game, I was really excited as I am a huge fan of Chinese mythology novels. I played the game on release, got to max level, did like 2 weeks of dungeon runs, quit. There was just nothing to keep me interested. Then when the 2.0 update came out, which made the game F2P, I leveled up one of the new classes, got to new max level, did a week of dungeons... and quit again. Still nothing to keep my interest, even a year later. Also, the 40€ I originally spent on the game, wanna know what they gave me after going F2P? Well, they gave me currency which was enough to buy... One outfit :)
oh man I was almost exactly the same, got to stundent 1, did some dungeons, then quit. So, I bought the priciest one and then I stopped playing once I reached the group content wall (and with me being solo player and all). Then outta the blue it went f2p, so I stopped caring. Good to know they only gave ppl who spent money a pat on the back. Truly, avoid anything gameforge. Someone actually predicted the f2p move during the countdown release cause it was gameforge published, man was given a buncha clown awards on the steam forum and now he's stacked on points and got the hearty last laughs.
Same, though the group content was good fun, there just wasn't enough of it. Shame that JSH didn't get to that part of the game, but we all know he'd then complain about the levelling process being a long, drawn out, glorified tutorial as well as the other complaints.
You also got vouchers for free stuff, a dance and something else, but overall, sure, what exactly shall they give you? They wouldn't need to give you anything. It's absolute normal, that you pay close to nothing for games after a while or even get them for free.
I’ve played quite a bit of this game! You said this game is for people who are “digital tourists” or “cutscene enjoyers”. I am both of those. (Yes. I AM a gw2 player.) I’m also a casual xianxia fan, who… cannot speak a word of Chinese. I’ve suffered through some BAD localizations, and this is… one of the worst I’ve seen. I enjoyed my time with it, because I burned a bit of cash to make my handful of characters look pretty- I am big into developing characters and backstory and making them look like they do in my head (it’s uh… a bit of a problem. I have 50 characters in gw2.) And, the best decision I made, by FAR… was to switch the voice lines to Chinese. Which I did within three minutes of booting up the game. Do I know what they’re saying? Nope. Do I understand the plot? Only through previous knowledge of xianxia tropes and a VERY strong suspension of disbelief. But it sounds a LOT better. Overall, I definitely had a better time than you did, but I agree wholeheartedly with the review. Great watch!
The overlapping voice acting at the very end got me good man. 10/10. I actually played this game on release and remember it being bad - but not quite this bad. The endgame content was quite good with excellent combat design and good fights, and the game has a lot of really good systems that work well with each other. Sadly, the story is extremely hard to follow and the localisation alone is enough of an indictment of the game.
@@scotch4890 cause it is? the end game boss fights are well designed the housing system allows for some great builds that someone could easily spend hours on (and if you look at the blueprints from the Chinese community they have) crafting I'm told exists but i never touched it so i can't comment on that oh the card games fun as well once you figure out how it actually plays because the localization does not fucking tell you really the worst two things about this game are the localization and the publisher (and a potential third being ITS USING THE HAVOK VISION GAME ENGINE - a game engine that was discontinued in like 2012 or something)
@@slimjong-un5743 I completely disagree with your choice of words. How can you claim that an aspect of a completely subjective experience is objectively true? Consider the endgame experience like macaroni and cheese, some people love it I personally hate it, but it always tastes the same. Same with end games.
In the middle of the "cutscene that does everything wrong," my computer froze and made a constant high-pitched noise. It took me several seconds to realize that it wasn't just another problem with the cutscene.
17:48 - “they are already headed to their graves. We should do that too later!” hahahahahahhahahaa oml did the voice actors become self aware?? Seriously this script is like the Oblivion NPCs became semi-sentient, read a whole bunch of google translated Chinese literature, and then randomly wrote up a game based solely on that. amazing
Also it said something was successfully accomplished (hurting the deku tree?) but the father's quest was already done. Was that why they wanted to die? I was so confused! 😂
When the dude interrupts the elder-ish seeming guy by yelling "Grandmaster!" while he's talking (around 20:26), I just want the guy to go "Don't interrupt!" and maybe slap him. I get that the timing must have matched with the original audio, but yeah... someone on the dub team obviously needed to be given control of the dialogue timing, and wasn't.
@@hazukichanx408 Yeah, if you play any other game with lip sync to chinese audio you'll see chinese dialogue is usually a fair amount shorter in technical length.
It's kind of sad, because I feel like there was a lot of potential for a decent game, maybe even a good game, but some people along the corporate chain dropped the ball or made some whacky decisions. I bought this on Steam when it first came out and I don't even think I played a second day before uinstalling and never touching again T_T Love this series by the way, been enjoying it while semi-afk horse training in BDO on a lazy Sunday. Cheers Josh! omg your "out of 10" outro was so good for this one I literally laughed out loud.
josh: feels like the voice actors were made to read the script without knowing anything about the story. me: you literally described how the chinese english dubbing scene works (yes china has studios that dub anime to english) learned this random info after watching ladybeard describe how he worked in the dubbing scene in taiwan...or was it Hong Kong, i cant remember
@@kiddhkane if you read it properly, I said they DUB anime. which means they dub japanese made anime into chinese and english. Also, they have been making their own anime for years. The first one that I saw and loved was The King's Avatar. Still waiting for season 3. edit: unrelated to the reply...rewatched ladybeard's interview and he was dubbing in hongkong.
As a player that played at launch until the first raid released, I can tell you, later down the line, the game does get a bit more difficult in terms of open world content, the story stays confusing as all hell, the voice acting stays the same, and there is many many other female npcs with male voices. The raid content is... fine, it wasn't some mega giga experience, but was far from bad, it took my guild a couple attempts for each boss except the last one it was an enrage timer boss that we just needed to push harder dps for and it took time to practice out when we want to pop our cds for what phases and when we can do good dmg as it became a bullet hell at some points and dps became secondary to survival, but some big cooldowns would pop at that same time. the housing, crafting, pets, mounts and all that seems to be just flair in terms of progression, pve and pvp gear in the endgame was separate from what i can remember and was grinded in similar fashion to wow with you spamming rbg to obtain currency and gear boxes. All in all it wasn't an ultra bad experience, but it didn't really excel at anything other than perhaps doing combat a bit better than it's competition in terms of pvp balance.
The voice lines and story were memeable, the gameplay was serviceable, and I only stopped playing because the population got obliterated. The housing system is beautiful. The things I saw people make with it was masterful. I wish an actual publisher would pick it up.
I loved this game for the theme and the style, since I love the Chinese ideal of Cultivation. But yeah, the regionalization was a little.... bad. It gets funny when you listen to just how phoned in some lines are or when an NPC starts in one language then changes to Chinese because they have not finished doing the translations. I'm just surprised you didn't use the one cutscene when the character starts their lines in English then mid word the Chinese voice takes over. The one you used with the sword in the temple makes sense though; he hit him so hard his voice actor forgot English!
I think they fixed this in release, but during the last beta weekend I had a character's VA gender change mid-cutscene, on top of the language flip flopping. It was pretty wild.
I wish there was a genuinely good game single player or mmo with a proper cultivation system. It's been becoming one of my favorite types of fantasy lately and I think it'd be cool if a western developer took hold of the concept and ran with it.
Josh Strife Hayes: "This was based on a popular TV series that was based on Kung Fu movies and Chinese lore" Also Josh Strife Hayes: "Why do they have elements of Kung Fu movies and Chinese lore in this game. This is confusing to me."
Tinfoil hat theory: The reason they did not bugfix, is because they were forbidden to do a more intrusive cash shop. Totally would expect such petty behaviour.
"You can animate what you want to have happen! Just have the model slap me on the shoulder in-game!" They couldn't fit that animation into their strict 88-gigabyte budget.
I knew going in the game would have pretty bad English voice acting. I noticed a lot of Asian MMOs don't put much effort into the English voices. Started the game with the voice in Mandarin. I enjoyed the game for the most part, didn't finish the main questline mostly bc its just too large of a game and I needed the space.
Specifically wuxia themed games, and not just limited to mmo. My chinese friends told me that wuxia is almost impossible to translate because it uses so many idioms and proverbs.
SOLO was the biggest disappointment in years for me, I hoped ffxiv would get a decent competitor, but poor localisation, boring gameplay and uninteresting classes quickly crushed my illusions :-(
i've been trying to find something to play in between FFXIV updates and ... nothing has been able to touch that special feeling FFXIV gives you when playing.
@@NGNetwork1 best thing with mmos is not to look for the exact same experience but enjoy the games for what they are. some recommendations I can make are: guild wars 1 -fun old school game guild wars 2 cool world to explore WoW classic/wrath of the lich king(when it comes out)- the original MMO experience, Blue Protocol looks like the best new MMO coming out
The Line Furrys and Gene-Stealers killed me XD Also for the non-sensical Plot, if you have read enough Wuxia Novels or Xianxia Novel this Plot line is as common as the European "Aktion hero go shoot guys" or any other well known cliche plot line. It was honestly neither suprising nor new in any shape way or form. The way they just throw stuff at you is like they expect you to know all the Wuxia terms and tropes already.
Ya know, I'm amazed at how many MMOs exist at this point. It's really something how companies keep crapping these things out in hopes of making money. It can't be the best way to go about it, considering how many of them are just so mediocre at best.
@@Nixrubin Well, I can only imagine that it takes the right talent and leadership to get such a large, complex game right. What Josh shows us is that many of them get some things right and some things wrong, making for an overall flawed playing experience.
So I decided to give it a shot and see what's up for myself. A few interesting points: - It's funny, but judging from the gameplay in the video, he hasn't actually got past the tutorial yet. It tells you tutorial complete after a certain point, and if you watch cutscenes it actually takes forever to get there. I have to say, I did not like that, just too long for me. - I decided to do a Chinese dub playthrough and guess what, the "English" client version is scuffed to the point that random English dubbing appears during "Chinese dub with Eng sub" cutscenes. - It's a VERY story driven game with a lot of context from the previous games, the genre itself and culture that I don't think anyone in the West will really understand nor should they be assumed to understand. It is based on the tv show, with multiple prequel games, steeped heavily in the xianxia genre and Chinese culture, there's quite literally ZERO hope for the common person in the West to actually understand what the hell is going on if they just jump in. - It is very traditional, fetch this fetch that. - Gameforge completely destroyed the English version it's THE dumpster fire of dumpster fires for a steam release. - Something positive, the graphics are very nice actually and the player housing construction is actually pretty awesome too. The building is like building a PoE hideout, but way better. There's verticality and scaling an asset up and down and rotating in any direction you want. Actually very cool and awesome. Since you can fly on a sword you can just fly around your "house" if you will. I didn't get far enough to see what you could actually do with housing but from a decorative standpoint, very cool. - Later on, it's actually a struggle to kill things in comparison to the one shots early on which I thought was also stupid, but I guess this was outside the tutorial levels or something like that. - The game is actually pay for time in China, meaning it's not a sub per say, you pay for how many hours you want to play and then you can just play that at any time. It's also not P2W in China which is probably why it's doing so well there too. - The game isn't fully released in the West, looks like they're adding content like more raids and dungeons as they go, too bad the base quality is so bad, again thanks to Gameforge I guess since they were responsible for the English localisation. - In the end, the housing is the only thing that I think could make me stay so far. Boss mechanics are okay so far, but I haven't really done all of them just yet either.
It doesn't help that we live in a culture of diversity hires, simply for the sake of diversity, many of whom have little to no previous experience. The best games are typically made by people who either played a plethora of games from the same genre and improved upon other's mistakes, or they take those concepts and reimagine them(similar to FF14 2.0). It's important to have people with the ability to implement those ideas. It also helps to have the resources to do so. Just for example, I grew up playing Final Fantasy games. While I loved the idea of playing a hero, the thought occurred to me one day that having the ability to play through two different story lines would not only add to gameplay time, but also story depth. You could finish the game first as the protagonist, and then play through as the antagonist. Of course back then, a very limiting factor was cartridge/disk space, and the Playstation version of those games were already 3-4 disks long. Implementing that idea into an MMO would take a little more imagination, and far more resources/ability than I currently have. This where is where brainstorming by multiple people who love the genre and have the ability to implement their ideas plays a key role.
If they'd played their cards right they could've done a game that plays like the old Hong Kong martial arts movies. Not the best translation, but decent and fun. But that is not what they did.
God SOLO. I played the closed beta and then for a good chunk of a year after the release, and the most memorable thing for me was the utter mindbreak I experienced as the game itself just broke the concept of translation itself. This is coming from someone who regularly Google translates Chinese novels. It got so bad that I was screenshotting every line of dialogue because I was in stitches from howling too hard. There were multiple instances where *people's names* in *the name box* got translated. To different degrees. I remember going back to Cloudrise to talk to Lushu Zidu (whose name is occasionally partially translated to Lushu Purple City) and Kunwuzi (whose name is occasionally accidentally partly Japanese-read...? to Kungozi. I have no idea how) to unlock Baxian area. And. I was greeted with this: "(Suddenly discouraged) Even you help he ...Well, if you can please take out the Wuxianzhan on the top of Sendaitai and drink a sip of the Xia Niu, I'm afraid there is still a glimmer of life." The devs asked for people to "be respectful" when bringing forward criticisms but frankly for a game that I had to pay to play, the fact that this level of """"translation""" that makes less sense to read in "English" than in Chinese is in of itself disrespectful-- and I can't even read Chinese. Actually, I have the game to thank for my better Chinese now, because I WAS invested enough to just look up the original Chinese texts to better understand the lore. That said, now that the game is dead, I wish there's a game with similar aesthetic and style to fill the void... I really do adore the atmosphere, though I wished there were places for me to actually appreciate the gorgeous areas without always attracting mobs.
In my experience anything that has to do with Chinese Martial Arts fantasy, be it video games, manhua, TV dramas, etc., gives little to no in depth explanation about the fundamentals of the lore. They seem to just expect you to have a baseline level of knowledge. Kind of a "Everyone knows what a goblin is." Sort of thing.
Comment above me got it right, its based on a Drama. The game expects you to bring its base knowledge, but yeah its no good for people who dont know shit about it.
I've read several Chinese fantasy web novels. They all explained mechanics and lore of their worlds in enough depth for me to understand it. Prior to reading those I knew basically nothing about the genre or Chinese mythology.
I haven't played this game, but as someone familiar with Chinese MMOs, here's a few explanations on how these things come to be: The overlapping voices: Like most languages, better vocabulary can often make phrasing more dense and precise. When Chinese dialogue is written for a literary flair, they often use a poetic phrasing that also adds some flourish, so you have the combination of dense information balanced with flourish. The people they hire to translate often don't bother to, or cannot translate this which balances out a little, but it's not enough to shorten the timing. To put it into perspective, Chinese uses only a single syllable per word, so without giving a foreign VA any indication of timing and not bothering to alter the cutscenes will lead to that. Convoluted story: This is 50% genre and 50% cultural. If a work of fantasy explained that a king has failed to draw the sword from the stone, you're probably suddenly aware it's Arthurian fantasy, and also understand the intrigue in that only the true king of Britain can draw the sword. Would this pop-cultural context not be present, none of that would make sense. Here's an example, in the cutscene where everyone is holding back the demon, one of the dudes starts resisting something and the explanation given is that he's a Mohist. This is a real philosophy that bears impartial care, depending on if or what additional context is given, this can mean the demon is less evil and more just there and innately dangerous, but not 'deserving' of being slain, the means of slaying the demon is unnecessarily cruel, or unleashing said means is a greater evil to him. From what I can tell, the sword turned him evil and affected his conscience. That's also why he's 'gifting' the sword around. Chinese people are understandably well-steeped in the rules of their fantasy. The issue with the genre is that in a way, it's built on this convolution, it is a heavenly bureaucracy after all, basically, godlike awesome beings are everywhere, but they're not just solving every problem because of equally cosmic things they are constantly attending to on top of layers upon layers of red tape. Chinese players: Native Chinese MMO players are often very different. Because negatives are more likely focused, they're often known as pay for power or convenience people because they didn't develop a stigma against that early on - "I have a job: I can't play as much, but I have money. Why can't I buy what I couldn't grind?" is a very logical thought process. But there's another aspect in that a Chinese playerbase can be very devoted lore junkies. If an MMO is popular in China, there's like a gazillion fan-written stories floating around, and lore being in written form outside of the game comes a lot more naturally. What you get is a playerbase that is split into people who will never pay attention to the plot in the first place and just want to see numbers go up and people who are extremely good at contextualizing what they see. This has unfortunately encouraged a sometimes hackneyed writing style that leaves gaps for these fan works by lazy companies. As a bonus, I'll decipher the 26:08 cutscene. "My big brother let me come here" - This can often refer to a sworn brother or an upperclassman which in this genre is often in the context of a martial arts school. In fact, the approaching student calls the master "brother" at the end of the cutscene, so what's lost in translation is that the master being spoken to is actually the elder brother, the student is simply using that term to refer to him. "During the duel... Taibai and Shenmai accupuncture points... Was it not your intention" - The master punched the other guy in a certain way and despite how they look, they are manlier than you and can talk with their fists. I am not kidding. First of all, both points are on the foot, which is not a point you usually aim to attack or do on accident. The Shenmai point represents stability and coordination, the Taibai point... is the Taibai point, but more importantly, there is an actual Mt. Taibai which apparently is where they're at. Not only that, Taibai is the immortal associated with Venus, so the master communicated a time as well. Because it was a friendly duel between master and student, the student inferred it's possible this meant something and interpreted it correctly. If this student gets better he and the master can probably just forego verbal communication and just punch each other. "Swordsmanship is easy to learn, but beautiful jade is seldom seen" - Jade symbolizes righteousness. Translation: 'Anyone can train to kill stuff with sharp things, but in my house you ought to also train your character.' This scene characterizes the master character as someone morally upright, and depending on what 'brother' his student was, he's either caring of his students, or has an actual brother or sworn brother in the other character - Likely the first, since he remarks on hoping his students take care in light of an oncoming disaster. People who learn his techniques are probably also taught to fight evil, so they would be in the line of danger. Furthermore, he can talk with his fists. Because he's subtle. Judging from the nature of the tutorial Josh gets after learning his stuff where you're meant to not hit the crystals, it's further storytelling since being concerned with not hitting targets implies he's training people to not friendly fire and to be mindful of where their attacks go. As for why his techniques seem less useful to Josh's character, it's either related to build or maybe the game has some convoluted chi cultivation system that would modify it. I wouldn't know though, haven't played. Call on me if you're ever curious about these Chinese lore convolutions, Josh. It won't matter in terms of rating a game for western audiences, but hey, maybe you're curious.
This was quite interesting to read and contextualizes the bizarre choices made in the localization. With a bit more care, the kind of care that a dedicated, scholarly, bilingual translation team would take, the important subtext that we missed as western gamers not inured in Chinese mythology and literary tropes could have been better fleshed out to the player and result in a richer story experience. Hope Josh sees this comment as well.
Thank you for this. The audio and localization complaint is valid - but I feel like the entire video was focused on this to "market" this review video. There are huge cultural aspects to this type of chinese xianxia/wuxia genre that you can tell Josh did not research - i.e "kung fu with some chinese lore". No sir this is aint jackie chan the mmo. Now the game obvious throws you into the deep end right away with this culture shock, and that's definitely one of the major flaws of this game. And new players that don't understand this genre should be rightfully confused and annoyed at what seems to be a strange story - but as a reviewer I expect more research and helping to educate the masses on such a topic.
I tried playing this for 2 weeks. the colors of the text confused me to, but it is class specific text! it marks what dialogue changes based on class you play
15:28 I finally figured out what is going on. They not only spent 5 bucks on the dub people but the translation from Chinese is literal. That is the reason Baiqian says "we can't control that guy anymore!"
One of your closing statements really reminded me of why I love The Lord of the Ring Online. Your character isn't the chosen one. You're an adventurer that deals with events that surround the story of the Fellowship. You meet the Fellowship several times and eventually become an integral part of it, answering to characters like Gandalf and Aragorn (among others). And there are recurring characters (though sometimes years apart in the game's development) and a lot of decent writing (even if some quests are not worth reading). Since you mentioned stage direction, Lotro does have some, though not terribly often.
I do remember the opening where you're trying to help Aragorn (as Strider) to save a person after they got stabbed with a morgul blade, but you couldn't stop it and they succumbed, turning into a wraith as well. Definitely a sadge moment
@@samtar2756 It is and they're still putting out expansions. I'm hoping he'll cover LotRO soon because they're changing their F2P model with the next major patch and making it free to play all content released up to Helm's Deep (so about level 95) and up to the latest expansion with a subscription.
Glad I didn't spend the $40 on this when it came out 😂 I thought the graphics looked good but a lot of eastern mmos that come to the west have poor English voice acting and poor cutscene optimization. Whenever I play games like this I use the Chinese/japanese/Korean voice over instead of the english 😂 I hate when the voice over overlaps with the next voice line or cuts off short and goes to the next line.
The voice acting layering over eachother like this reminds me a lot of when I visited a supermarket in Japan, where they had little speakers all over the place to advertise all sorts of products. Sensory overload - but it seemed normal to everyone else °-°;
13:58 "The game literally just told me if I touched it, I would die. And now I am inside it." Obviously: you touched it, you died, and now you're a ghost.
"I am convinced none of the voice actors were given indications of character or situations or setup". This was my thought as well. The performances seem to have nothing to do with the characters they are performing. For some of these it's like they were given a drawing of a character from a zany cartoon show like The Fairly OddParents and told that's who they were. If the actors just had to make their best guess based upon the text of the dialogue, it's very possible they thought they were making a cartoon or comedy.
Looking for ambitious, martially skilled individuals willing to participate in a group God-devouring exercise. Must be family-oriented and be unbothered by warm environments and snakes. Inquire with Rya.
4:45 This is very accurate for a lot of games actually, not just ones like this. Voice actors will be given an excel spreadsheet of lines or something similar to record, and just go through them with no real idea what's happening.
@Team Rocket's Slowpoke a good example is the last of us. atleast in the first one (dont know about the second) dialoge is voiced TOGETHER. this meant they had to cast voiceactors who have at least a bit of chemistry, but the results are awesome and worth the work.
@@the4given196 Comparing localization and original voice acting is comparing apples to oranges. Chinese voice actors probably knew what they were voicing.
@@the4given196 The Last of Us part 2 took it a step further, where all actors are together at all time even if they have no dialogue. Both TLOU games had the actors doing mo-cap in suits for most of the acting
I remember playing the beta - the game didn't have the English Voice acting in beta, so I created a thread asking what's up in which the game's harcore community attacked me for questioning it.. Interesting how things turn out..
![[TH] 2024 PMGC League | Survival Stage วันที่ 1 | PUBG MOBILE Global Championship](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/FVFT-PFwU80/mqdefault.jpg)
"As a player character, you have subtitles but no voice" I think this is one of the few games where that is a blessing
yes with these terrible voices indeed, FF14 i really want our character have voice already
@@kyotheman69 no
@@kyotheman69 yeah that would be nice
@@kyotheman69 having played SWTOR, i can tell you that voiced responses can actually ruin the story even if the voice acting is good, because there's a bigger chance of the character saying something in a way you weren't expecting. FF14 is better without voices
Well, in english at least.
It's so refreshing to see an MMO be bad for reasons other than being highly P2W.
He had done a few like that but at least half have that dreaded cash shop focus. Or kinda worse Didn't have a cash shop at first but git bought out by the company that shall not he named and had the shop added for whale hunting
The fact that it's one that's so new is shocking though
Overall you can't even judged it in the moment, since the non chinese versiojn is in a giant catch up rush. Many problems come from that, everything is going so quickly, you got new dungeons and raids pretty much every 2-4 weeks and item level also escalates, while more problems are created by the breaking down to earlier levels to somehow fit, what for example isn't good for balance.
Not really a super good idea, at least not working all too well, but how good or bad the game is will be the question at the end of this catchup when it's really the actual, current game, not old, reversed stuff - and it will also be very interesting how the complete rework with the new engine will work out.
Overall something absolut rare to see, that a developer re-creates his game witha new engine, near to no developer pushes so much work into a game.
sadly, that's the gaming world we lie in today because of retards people's purchases
@@miriamweller812 Guh?
If you ask me, the voice acting is the most realistic in any MMO I've ever seen.
No one is coherent, everyone talks over each other, their own idea of what was said doesn't even line up with what they articulated; it's refreshing to see an MMO be so ambitious as to perfectly capture your average trip to a Wal-Mart
haha that last part was unexpected
😂😂😂 jesus I laughed so hard
The Sarcasm is strong with this one
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL😂😂😂😂
A true mumblecore RPG epic
“Those people are all headed straight into their own graves. We could also do that later” What an icon
I mean, even the player characte dies and comes back - it's not really something you want to do, thogh, since it is quite an effort to lead something back and very risky.
haahahahh
I love the way he says that last bit kinda sounds like he's asking her out
@@ChillavaKirby "eyy bb wanna go to our graves later?"
The audio balancing literally managed to scare someone just walking past the TV. This game is top tier entertainment.
You could say, first monitor content.
@@Nioureux first monitor but not fullscreen
Do u mean: walking past the second monitor ?
@@Nioureux I only have one monitor. All content is first monitor content.
Is there any other GOOD wuxia type mmo's out there? I read a lot of wuxias and would love it
Josh, this is completely unfair.
The voice acting gets good in the end game.
you nearly killed me with that! this should be pinned
XD
@@gingerbeargames Funny enough that's what all the ppl say that still play that lmao
Ironically, this is actually the case for ff14. Replaying 2.0 story is just awful in the voice acting department
In fairness... that actually happened in FF14 at the end of the ARR story hehehe
"To avoid embarrassing himself, he jumps towards the moon."
Is a great line and well-delivered.
That's what Id do
THANKS FOR THE SPOILER
I laughed for a solid minute at that
Best description of my high school days
"Something exciting happened... I finished a pen."
This writing is substantially better than that of the game.
Well.....Not anymore, surely, since the pen is empty?
The small video coming up to show the lack of ink on the paper was really what got me
You mean not writing? Cause his pen died, how is Josh gonna write?
Game: "he grabs his shoulder"
Josh: "if you write it out, it should be a book."
game: gives you books to read
Josh: "... alright"
I am a voice actor that gets cast in these kinds of projects. Can say, they give you little or no direction, and around 80% of the info given is in Chinese. The people involved are mostly young actors that are extremely excited to be a part of a videogame, it is a really positive community :) If you want a primary source about eastern localization VO feel free to hit me up xD
Hey buddy! I'm quite intrigued by your comment's last section! I'm a Chinese-Hunarian mixblooded person, with atleast c1 level of knowledge of English and soon will receive my HSK5 certificate. If there's gonna be a new project, then I would gladly join it.
But it still doesn't really justify how lackluster the voice acting feels.
@@midorifox ofcourse I doesn't. But it explains thst most of the time the voice actors aren't at fault. Ots the company.
@@germansausage7310 ah,yes. that's also right
@@germansausage7310 I think a really good voice actor could manage to deliver a line or two really well even if the director is dog shit. Of course the company should be thinking about doing stuff well with actual professionals but I digress.
Perfect villain quote doesn't exis---
"They are headed for the grave. We might also do that later".
Very honest when it comes to game, no? I mean, how often do you have such a scene and then can just do something else instead?
Hell, FF14 for example got it as part of the story itself. "You must stop that dragon (in the north)! Now travel to that country south, someone wants to talk there to you about something, whatever".
To be fair to this game, this is a really good representation of the wuxia/cultivator style of manhua/webtoon/story. It's utterly incomprehensible, throws around nonsense at every moment, people refuse to do any work when they can pass it off to a subordinate and nobody who's actually anybody shows up or does anything because they're all busy doing something else.
To note on the classes being gender specific as well, though not really discussed in the video, in wuxia stories, men contain Yang energy, which is typically associated with fire, aggression and combat type abilities, while women contain Yin energy, which is usually more esoteric like healing, ice or sound. Normally in these types of stories, males can't learn Yin powers and vice-versa because it's incompatible with their energy. So while weird, it does make sense for the genre for classes to be gender locked.
That is pretty ancient concept which is rarely used in most of Chinese games now.Most mainstream idea is both male and female are balance between Yin and Yang. It is just one has more leaning to the other; but doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive to one and other.
Moreover, this game doesn't play this rule either. For example, Summoner is learning Yang style spells while Reaper is Yin style spell which is part of their lore. However, neither of them is gender locked. (The Grandmasters for both of them are male ) Furthermore, Wu Zhao clan is pretty close with concept of Yin, yet they do contain both male and female.
The only gender-locked classes are Floral Palace duo, but Yin and Yang is not the logic they split.
Chinese wuxia stories are in general - shit.
It's not surprising game based on shit story is shit.
"Now the bad guy shows up and attacks a tree, because that's a totally rational, evil thing to do"
WoW writers: Seems legit
to be fair, his bark is worse than his bite.
@@ryanweible9090 Burned Treebark smells pretty good and cant bite. Agree with you
*Melina from Elden Ring enters the chat*
Eying the Great Deku Tree in the distance
I mean what if the tree was some sort of guardian tree that kept evil spirits from infecting people and turning them insane to kill everyone?
I'm sure there's a reason lost in the uh... interesting... English translations in the game.
The overlapping cutscene dialogue is most likely due to the lines being shorter in Chinese but the cues for them not being adjusted to compensate for the new length.
Yea I was gonna comment the same thing. Can tell especially when they switch to Chinese after saying the same thing in English you can tell how quick it is comparatively
Same for the overlapping GUI buttons I bet. They're bigger then originally programmed due to english using more letters. (I mean, you COULD program your GUI in a way that adapts dynamically to the buttons content but looks like the budget for that went to marketing).
Sounded like someone spam skipping through dialog prompts 😂
@@facepalmization2841 Nope, I'm a Hindu nationalist and I disagree.
🍻
"Have you every get so angry you spoke chinese?"
I'm fairly certain most chinese parents do that to their kids. My mother can vouch for that lmao
I dunno, if I get angry enough I short out and speak a language that definitely isn't english. I mean... Engrish. My Engrish racks disaprine if upset.
Happens all the time in Firefly!
I have a friend who used to get mad and speak......whatever the voice actor of Amy Wong from futurerama spoke when mad. He just literally quoted her outbursts verbatim. He had a perfect memory for sound and did voice acting. His kids told me they knew they were introuble when their 50 year old very Irish father started to sound like a 20 something Chinese woman. To be clear he got mad and started speaking a language he doesn't understand but would be understood by a true speaker of the language......both impressive and kinda dumb to put that much effort in to that lol
@@geoffok Chinese should be a language
@@geoffok it's a language group, but you can still say you speak Chinese. Be that Fuzhounese, Cantonese, Mandarin, etc
This MMO plays like a D&D campaign I was in, years ago; The DM was so scared we'd win any boss fight against her precious boss NPCs that **every boss fight** had excuses and railroaded mechanics to sideline us.
Then we got to sit back and listen to her loving describe some other NPC she made coming in to save us, every time. It was the equivalent of a combat cinematic for D&D.
At one point, we told her we were fighting the boss ourselves, or quitting. We ended up winning and, as I am about to kill the biss (Who was a minion to the real Big BNad, not even the Big Bad himself); She vetoed it.
Just 'No, you find you can't kill him. Your body won't move.' Then the minion (It was not his turn yet): Knocked me out (No save allowed), cast a spell that pushed the party 50 feet away (No saves allowed), and teleported away. All in the same round of combat, while it was not his turn.
You stopped playing in that campaign.
I was watching this on my laptop and when you said, "I talk to this character's boobs..." my wife looked up from her Switch and then we both started laughing when you called her out on it. Thank you for that moment, Josh. :)
what min? xD
Lucky guy married to a woman of culture
@@eastbow6053 it's at 24:01
I always expect it, but he always gets me with it.
Is your wife single?
The overlaping audio is actually a feature to get you through the story even faster
This just shows that the "big L" on the dev company are the team charged with the audio and sound design of the game. They can't even edit a take from a VA, probably the VA says the line a couple of times so sound engineers edit and cut-off the parts they don't want and keep the lines that fit the best, instead they just put the entire unedited audio file into the game. You can see that this isn't the only audio issue with the game, so yea, VA aren't exactly the best for sure but the sound design team made it 100 times worse.
The animations are timed for the original Chinese audio clip length which are usually faster than English. So instead of adjusting either the animation length or matching the audio timing they just replaced the audio files. This is what happens :)
@@LordRaven256 That actually make sense~ Thank you!
So, if anyone wants to play this game. They should just stick to playing it in original audio.
Damn, FFXIV could have used this feature :D
Just a note about the strange story: this is straight up a Xianxia novel transposed to videogame medium. That's why every somewhat important character is considered a massive badass with "super powers"; every character worth giving a shit in a Xianxia novel is super awesome and powerful and talented. So for a eastern, most likely chinese audience, this kind of story is more common, and therefore more acceptable, than to a western one simply due to cultural factors.
The 70s martial arts movies you reference are in fact based of Wuxia novels, which share many tropes, but are more focused on real/martial arts aspect of awesome heroes (similar to the western Arthurian Tales or The Song of Roland) rather than the spiritual aspect.
The game doesn’t even have any cool cultivation
Some Wuxias can be fun to read, though they're a little ruined by the main character always having god level plot armor (or else the book just ends lol), but I can't imagine them being a coherent game for westerners. Too slow paced, so so many cultural differences, and more tropes than you would think are possible.
The only good Xianxia/wuxia webnovels I've read were the ones that didn't dead ass focus on cultivation, but rather, the characters. The power trips were there, but they were the side dish. The vast amount of CN MC's apathetic to the people around them made me apathetic to the world they live in. Why this is so prolific in CN novels I'll never understand.
Even in this case, I would have to think that only being able to watch the cool things and not do the cool things must’ve been boring on both sides of the pacific.
It's cleary a high fantasy setting.
As new character you are already special, an immortal = somehow who surpassed normal human limits, but this still means shit, because this goes far further.
What's actually makes it interesting. You ARE special. but you are not the unique chosen one super sue the whole universe spins around.
What's weird about the voice acting being so bad is that their pronunciations are all consistent with each other, so there was clearly active direction of the actors.
I've heard this said about movies, but I think it definitely applies here too: if there's one bad performance, it's the actor. If every performance is bad, it's the director.
16:07
Josh: Can everyone fly the moment it suits the plot?!
Me: According to every modern chinese martial arts/sword fighting show. Yes.
Never talk to me or my chinese shows/novels/donghua/Manhuas ever again
Llpppppppppp
Llpppppppppp
@@lugulushackulus5223 Keep my chinese shows/novels/donghua/Manhuas out of your fking mouth! - says Will Smith
Every cultivation story: Yes.
I opened Josh's Twitch in the background while I was watching this because he popped into the premiere chat to say he'd be going live soon. It started autoplaying the vod from his last stream. It took me a good few minutes to realise the two overlapping Josh voices weren't just a joke about this game's sound balancing.
Your comment probably has more plot than SOLO.
nah, it does at the end, so the joke still stands
The fact I started reading this comment a couple seconds before he did that joke at the end just makes this even better.
I loved the "I will not accept gifts from enemies!" "You will" "Understandable, have a nice day"
That part made me laugh so much. It was essentially the *charisma 100* meme but played straight
Like, I get the intent here. They clearly wanted to make it clear that bad guy was using compulsion magic to make other guy take the evil sword and be evil. Sure, whatever.
It just... wasn't really sold all that well.
@@webbowser8834 Yeah, but it was edited and voiced incredibly poorly. Like, they could have made it at least seem like the other guy was struggling, put some effect in the "you will" to have a "dark powers" effect.
@@ProfiteerProphet Yeah, no arguments there.
It sounded like some NPC dialogue from Oblivion
I played a bunch of this game at launch and really enjoyed it, mainly because of the visuals. I also played the game with fully Chinese voices and relied on the subs to get everything, it's a lot better that way, unfortunately. I agree with pretty much everything you said here, there's a reason I'm not still playing. But I did want to point out one thing you said that was wrong. In the first dungeon it changes your visuals, not your gear. It's a purely cosmetic thing. I still hated that part of the dungeon, especially since I picked up a few costumes and those get overridden as well. But you do go through it using the equipment you have earned unlike what you said. Also, it is the only dungeon in the game that does this. Still a really bad way to introduce players to dungeons because it doesn't just change your gear visuals, but your face as well, and in a game where visuals are the main selling point... That seems like a bad idea.
Whenever I see games like this I feel really bad for the 3D artists who've spent thousands of hours carefully modelling, texturing and building the world, having no say on how the game should play.
No reason to feel bad, they got paid for their work.
I'd only feel bad for them because their work got butchered in this localization. From what I know the game was well received and enjoyed where it was made.
@@MrInsiipid the Chinese voice acting isn’t nearly as bad. And the sound is probably much better. I think the reason why there is so much overlap is because the actual Chinese voice lines were shorter, so when they put in the English voice lines, they were to long.
@@alpha_9997 Yeah, the book style that the game is based on have the same problem. What is one or two sentences in chinese becomes a page long paragraph in english.
@@SkorpioVenom yeah… sometimes translations don’t go so well…
when this game came out 2 weeks prior i lost my left tumb and index finger, one of my buddy's bought this game for me to cheer me up, i no lived like mad the first the 2 months i was in the top 100, it gave such a rush. during that time period i was pretty depresed lost my job, felt worthless thought about suicide alot those days,couldn't use my left hand anymore but this game gave me new friends and some of them helped me see the bigger picture again, i quit the game and came outside again this game saved me in a weird way.
i’m honestly glad you were able to make it through all that. i’d say that alone makes this decidedly *not* the worst MMO ever.
It’s amazing how sometimes mmos have that affect. I’ve been there, different causes though. Once you get past the struggle a bit you lose desire to play the game
So your friend saw that you lost a thumb and and index finger and said " hey let me see how well you can still use WASD" Your friend's a dick lol...glad you pulled through though
@@Toshi3.71 i get what you mean, i was afraid to use my hand it helped cross certain barriers in my head, funny enough you learn pretty fast to cope with missing fingers. At first i was also like wtf why you giving me an mmo for dipshit :p
I Hope You’re doing much better today, friend!
"...and make everyone in the background start paying attention."
Well played, Strife. You win this round.
Yup.
you guys dont watch josh on your secound monitor? you'd see the boobs before anything else!
Yeah, he got me good.
I definitely had to contemplate my decisions in life right after this because i was very distracted, but that got me back quick.
"Why are the demons from Yorkshire" easily my favorite thing said in the entire video 😂
Let me remind everyone of something.
We pretty much had to BEG the devs to let us change to the original Chinese language because, originally, it was going to only have English for our version and ABSOLUTELY NO ONE WANTED IT.
That's surprising. You'd think that would have been an option by default.
What do you mean? Doesn't everyone love to hear people with Shakespearean accents recorded on a Motorola phone in their Eastern Fantasy MMO?
man i was wondering if orginal Audio was available, may still pick this up then.
Are there any mods or anything that make the story coherent (For non chinese linguists)? I do have a soft spot for wuxia stories, and while the cutscenes did it no favour I can see that world building in this mmo might be kinda good.
@@Youboremenow It has subtitles... they will be at a similar level of quality to 99% of wuxia you read.
The story is also around the quality of 99% of wuxia you read.
A solid "why"/10.
The intro cutscene voice acting wasn't that bad, it's mediocre at worst.
Perfectly serviceable compared to the rest of the voice acting.
Im srry but a women character that is voice acted by a man who didn't even wanted to try a high pitched voice to remotely sound like a women? That is quite bad unless you have an even worse example than this 😂
@@_Stefo im pretty sure he meant the part with the Narrator doing dialogue for the backstory of the lore.
sometimes a thing only seems mediocre compared to the human rights violations in their proximity
I thought it was decent.
@@_Stefo Like the polish movie dubs i keep getting when i pirate a movie lol.
You know what, I pre-ordered this, then before launch refunded it to purchase at a later date. During the refund, the support team said "Once you refund you wont be able to rebuy the game", I lol'd and said okay that's fine.
I think support team was helping a homie out.
lmao, legends
How did the Devs get away with this? Everyone involved in and in charge of the voice acting, translation and subtitles should never be allowed to work in localisation again
Quality isn't really the standard for the western entertainment industry these days.
@@WallNutBreaker524 ...This wasn't made by the Western entertainment industry
@@cartoonishidealism582 The localisation clearly wasn't done by the Chinese developer though. This is a western company either doing the absolute bare minimum or actively mocking the media they're being paid to translate because they know the Chinese company can't tell or won't care.
@@cartoonishidealism582 It was probably localized by them, though.
@@cartoonishidealism582 this was made by people wanting to port the game to the west
This is the first "Worst MMO" Josh has reviewed that I actually want to try. The too funny voice acting, beautiful graphics and the fact the game isn't pay to win was enough to try it.
So how did it go?
@@IndianTheNaked I play off and on still. The game sort of bogs down in the upper levels but it's always good for a bit of mindless fun.
same, although I'd still play with the chinese va
Wait the voice acting was real?😂
"the furries have joint up with the genestealers" damn, that's some nightmare stuff even the chaos gods have nightmares about.
Slaneesh Cultist 🤝 Genestealer
Hating SOLO
"Then this voice actor delivers his lines with so little energy if he were any more relaxed he would be medicly dead."
This line made me laugh so hard i almost died
It made me sad because he pretty much described how French VA have sounded like these past 15 years when subbing anime D:
@@Biouke Is there anyone under the age of 30 who doesn't watch Anime? I feel like these people are the victims of MK Ultra, I fail to see the appeal.
What's funny is that particular clip, had average kind of OKAY level voice acting. It sounded like a character at least, instead of 1970s Kung fu voice dubs
@@Grandmastergav86 while anime is really big in Asia like One piece considered a kids show in there. It doesn't make much a impact in western(because their trending is currently tiktok or some sh*t) and even they did,they usually watch by themselves and don't want to share to their family.
I remember the one time I finished a pen. It felt amazing. I looked back at all the ink I had poured over many notebooks. Years of constant writing and impeccable reporting.
Truly, one of the greatest achievements of my life. You must be proud.
Quest: "grab healing herbs that are only 10ft away"
Me: "oh, is this lost ark?"
Lmao you nailed it
Except for the fact that your character is actually shown doing things a main character does XD
"Go tell these people to do this thing"
_Turns slightly to the left to target NPC_
You sure you need my help with this one?
"OH, I dropped my medicine! Can you fetch it for me?"
*Presses G*
"OH Thank you kind sir! You're a hero!"
@@gotdangedcommiesitellyahwa6298 lmaooo i love lost ark but that's always annoying 💀
I had such high hopes, I love the Chinese fantasy setting and those games rarely get translated to English ... I was so disappointed.
Feels like the game would've been much better if they skipped the English VA and used that money to do a better job at translating instead.
Yeah it seems nothing released in the west so far has beaten age of wushu when it had it’s golden days. Too bad it too has died down
it would've been great imo, they should've just used the chinese VA and english subs, and used less money for advertising
I remember a time when MMOs were first starting to be voice acted, and a lot of the dialogue you still had to read because they didn't pay enough voice actors. But then I hear this game where they got so many of them talking at the same time. We've gone full circle. I guess I prefer quality over quantity.
I also would prefer quality. I'm okay with voice acting only being in cutscenes and important moments if it's well done. Bad voice acting through the whole game can ruin it, I'd rather just read walls of text
@@ImaginaryAlchemist Even in the early days i wished voiced NPCs would shut up lol. I remember launch week of EQ2, roaming through the city of Qeynos hearing NPCs shouting through the walls of their respective buildings. I still have what they shout stuck in my head 'MY WIFE MAKES THESE DELICIOUS CRUNCHIES! I WANT MY CRUNCHIES!" lol
I started with EQ and like so many I just wanted Fippy Darkpaw to speak out his reincarnation number but knew I would get tired of the repetitive nature soon if they actually did that. I went from no voice acting to now and I really like quality acting from key characters and little to no voices from background npcs especially In hub towns
"Have you ever gotten so angry you spoke Chinese?"
Josh, my dude, swear words in certain Chinese dialects are the BEST.
🤢
@@ayhatelgbtqrst6020Your username and emoji use makes me think you believe you are the edgiest most cool being alive.
@@ayhatelgbtqrst6020 😩🍆💦
Firefly taught me that.
I feel like Gameforge will see this financial failure as affirmation that p2w is the only profitable model instead of realizing that this game failed because of poor execution. Plenty of people will pay loads for only cosmetics if the core game is actually good. Just look at Path of Exile. Edit: To be fair, PoE's stash tabs are debatably p2w.
I'm fully convinced they torpedoed the game on purpose specifically for this reason, the same way Disney sabotaged Treasure Planet because the animation techniques used to make it were high-effort and expensive.
1 person spent $700,000 on Lost Ark in Korean version. how many players in PoE have to spend money to reach this number? to do 1 upgrade after +20 = $30 and the chance to succeed is 3-1.5% and you have 6 parts of gear to upgrade. Genshin Impact made $1 billion from microtransactions in around 6 months. GTA 5 also make billions per year. sure in PoE players pay loads of money for cosmetics, but in p2w they spend unfathomable amount of money. guess which 1 the developer will choose to make money?
@@SapiaNt0mata the amount spent doesn't mean a thing, p2w is p2w. if i had to spend one cent to get access to the strongest gear in the gear immediately it's p2w.
the only reason a person would spend alot of money on something is because the person likes the game.
@@hovsep56 you missed the point. the amount of money players spend does matter. someone spent $4,000 at once to open the lootboxes of Genshin Impact. how many people have to buy cosmetics to reach $4,000 that 1 player spent with 1 time spending? that's the point for the amount. someone that spends $700,000 means he/she likes the game, otherwise that person wouldn't spend even $1
@@SapiaNt0mata it does not matter at all, a game can be cheap and still be p2w hence my example of paying one cent to get the strongest gear in the game.
you still PAID a amount to win. the size don't matter.
it's called p2w not pay x amount to win
I was fully prepared for 'have a great day' to be spoken in Chinese, with a subtitle informing me that Josh Strife Hayes drinks from his cup.
It's startling to think that this game may have actually done better in sales and player retention if they had removed the voiceovers in their entirety.
True.
1:14 I speak Chinese. It still sounds like a high school drama club trying to out-act each other.
Mandarin or Cantonese?
@@gh0rochi363why would you even ask him this, he doesn’t know u lol
@@doctorfeelgood2670 it's exactly benefit I didn't know him I asked duh 😂. I'm over here just curious and it offended you for some reason 😂.
Dam that's bad, I would have thought in it's native language it would be massively improved.
@@gh0rochi363 sorry for replying to a dead comment thread, never realized anyone replied to this. I speak both and read/write Traditional Chinese. Albeit English is my main/better language, and always has been. In fact my Chinese standards has arguably taken a dive in recent years ever since I moved to the UK 🤣
Its clear the animation was timed for the original voice actors and they didnt go back with the dub to retime anything. Its the reason a lot of chinese games just dont get western dubbing because the time span for speech over the amount of information is RADICALLY different.
Nothing but excuses.
A lot of people fail to notice this, so they just complain, and that's understandable. But, people also are lazy and don't read. It's much more immersive to just use native voice settings and read subtitles, if you can watch anime with subs (which you should, if you don't your a heathen) you can easily over look 70% of the complaints in this video lol
I prefer subs 90% of the time and started MMOs with evrrquest so issues with text here. I went to school for multimedia and game design so oh this game was handled brings up a lot of red flags. Instead of a planned out localization its like they just had an AI try to split the difference between the two
@@raijuko BS excuse for their laziness. Also I tried this and some cut-scenes were so poorly timed that this doesn't work because it would cut away before they even finished talking.
Makes me think you didn't even play the game you're defending.
@@raijuko then just don't do the dubbing at all instead of doing a bad one.
"The classes are genderlocked and you have access to the 3 genders: Man, Woman, and Small Girl."
If I had a nickel every time I saw an Eastern developed MMO that could fit this exact description, I swear to god.
I’m sadden when Loli is removed for Loli-furry.
@@mramisuzuki6962 yes
genderlock only happens with those 3 classes tho, and even the chinese original devs agree it was a mistake
@@Negritis I'd say "Fair enough" and "I understand" if it didn't keep happening. Consistently. With the obscene majority of MMOs from that region.
Blade and Soul
Black Desert Online
Lost Ark
Tera
MapleStory
Bless Online / Unleashed
And those are the ones that, as far as I know, are still in operation along with this game. And it's hardly an exhaustive list.
And feel free to make any number of excuses defending the choices made. Contrived lore reasons invented by the same developers making these choices, cutting developmental cost, using hetero sex appeal to sell their game in an oversaturated market, doesn't matter.
But at the end of the day, it has been done so much by this specific region of the market that it's become a meme and it's going to be hard to wash that stink off.
For me to have any interest in any MMO from that region, the very first thing I have to check is, granted, the MTX abuse, but the second thing is if there's gender locking and how bad it is. Because it's a massive problem.
@@SpellboundTutor I'm not saying it isn't, I'm saying that out if 8(7 if we say the 2 warrior is one) classes only 3 (1) has gender lock
I'm not a fan of it either, but Josh did disservice to the game with saying it's gender locked implying a full lock which isn't true
The new class also won't be locked afaik
I did try this game when it became f2p on steam and one of the first things I did was to change the voice from English to Chinese and it did change the experience for good.
Some of the things that made me lose interest were:
First: For some reason no one wanted to do dungeons which were supposed to be one of the main sources of gear from what I understand, and while you can do the first dungeons with those companion npcs, at some point you are forced to do it with other people, people that didn't want to do them so I hit a wall there.. Only thing I can think of is that maybe most of the people that play are already max level and don't have time or will to do those other lower level dungeons.
Second: Even if you ignore the dungeons, you can still advance in the story and hit student level 1 which is good and I did. Big problem is however that when I hit that student level, I got a box with gear and was sent to some area to continue with the cultivation/student quest thing.
The gear on that box was level 130 or 140, I can't recall the exact level but I am pretty sure it was more than triple the level of my older gear, so you may think it was decent gear to faceroll older content and be able to quest normaly in the place they send me in order to at least be able to farm end game gear with other players which are probably all playing in those higher level areas right?
Well wrong, turns out that even with the gear they gave me the, experience in that area was totally different... Basically each mob in that area felt like a mini boss from one of the dungeons, so a quest that should take like a minute would take like 10 or something since each mob had tons of life, hit like a truck and had massive defense, if you add to that the companion npcs that have like a 10 minutes cooldown glitch like 90% of the time on the open maps and just stand there as my character was obliterated by garbage minions, at some point I just lost my patience and stop playing the game.
Don't get me wrong, maybe there was something I miss between the main story quest that levels you to student leven 1 and that garden area or whatever in which I was too weak to play. But thing is that aside from dungeons than no one wanted to do and that only seems to drop gear way lower level than that box they gave me, plus some daily demon hunter quests.. I didn't find a way to get gear strong enough to survive in the area I was sent to, and since that was the only thing that the game was leading me to do I just got bored... Heck I even search for youtube videos on how to gear up, but all content was from like a year ago when the game was not f2p, so it was partially obsolete I guess..
JOSH KILLED THIS MMO
Devs: "We made an mmorpg with no pay to win! You're welcome."
Players: "Awesome! Does it have good storywriting?"
Devs: "No... but lots of cutscenes!"
Players: "Oh, ok, but is the voice acting decent?"
Devs: "Oh god no."
Players: "Hmm, how's the combat?"
Devs: "You one-hit bosses."
Players: "...and the quests?"
Devs: "You'll get to fetch stuff, and it's only 10 feet away!"
Its Gameforge not the devs, the devs had nothing to do with the translations, it was Gameforge's job to do it
@@suiker1224 Still green-lighted by the devs. Clearly shows they didn't put much effort or budget into ensuring quality in that department.
@@suiker1224 The quests and combats were done by the devs though. They clearly did not test the end-product before shipping it.
Not the only MMO that has a fetch quest where the items are 10 feet away, thats the trope of all MMO. Except for one, New World, where they make you walk all the way to the other side of the map to fetch something to come back and then go all the way back to get the item that was next to the item you just fetch them.
@@suiker1224 No matter who to blame. If a game can't even get translation and UI adaptive right. Do you still think they actually care about the game..........and These game company are mega rich asses. They literally can just smash money to make everything works
In a moment of weakness in my life, I applied as QA tester for this game. Luckily, my salary expectations were apparently too high, so when they realised how much a professional tester costs, they changed the advertisement from "senior QA tester" to "internship".
I'm sure that whoever they hired, they reported some of these bugs (they are impossible to miss), but GF simply didn't care to fix them. It's a pity when years of development are ruined by a very poor QA. This is not Cyberpunk 2077 or New World, but still, it could have probably been a better game.
So true. At least CDPR are still working to fix cyberpunk, whereas this MMO was likely soft abandoned the moment it went f2p.
Also a QA here, good fucking god this looks like they didn't even attempt to fix the most bloody obvious issues.
I did preproduction in the US on this game prior to GF being involved. Simply put by the time it is released to us they aren't going to make many changes for the US audience or worry about bugs *unless* it does well. See something like ArcheAge. Their main hope is to make a bit of side hustle cash so to speak. The risk vs reward of putting that much effort in and it will likely fail is high.
Not understating the importance of a proper QA team, but even volunteer QAs could catch half of these issues.
@@xianx2658 the think is that stuff provokes it to fail.
At least one line of dialogue was spot on. "Everything is complicated today." ... I felt that.
The rating out of 10 for this one absolutely killed me. This was a great episode all around.
Oh no... I was so hyped for this game when it came out preordered to play the beta and everything, I'm just really into xanxia. Played everyday for the first two months and was part of some of the first groups to clear jade palace, first raid. Then my friends started getting tired of doing dailies with little progress and I was left alone, could only stand it for another month for I dropped off. Had a lot of fun now time to see if it gets torn apart lol!
Edit after watching: It sucks so bad that the actual combat depth of the game only really starts after you hit max level ( student ) and can access the none beginner difficulty for dungeons. The encounters are genuinely fun and challenging at that point and it makes the fact that the story is one huge tutorial that much more painful.
On another note the instance you did has a plot reason you look different. See if you read the journal entries those 'demon' looking people are called nocturnal spirits and they used to look human until some corruption changed them, the instance is a flashback to a battle that took place with an enemy army before there corruption and your playing as a group of nocturnal spirits still in their human forms. The reason they called you humans from wuzhao is that is where the nocturnal spirits originally came from.
Another note is this game is heavily inspired by Chinese Xanxia stories which is basically Chinese mythologies own version of western fantasy and has many of its own tropes and the such. So while the plot is really ruined by many of the translation and voice acting errors playing this game without knowing anything about the genre is akin to playing a western fantasy game without knowing what a wizard or a dragon is, hence a lot of the context your might be assumed to have, weapon spirits, expert level fighters usually being able to fly, cultivation tropes, are lost since the genre assumes you have some baseline understanding of how the genre usually handles those things
All in all this game just makes me sad everytime I see it as I had 200 hours of incredible time at launch with it, and even wrote a shitty dungeon guide for it, any really appreciate the none p2w commitment they went with. Ultimately the game will probably die a slow death in the west unfortunately, such is the fate of average MMORPGS
Actually the problem of "Humans from Wu Zhao" line is the "humans" part. As you said, the incident took place prior to their corruptive transformation; hence both Wu Zhao people and the rival clan were just people at time. "Human" is not approprite term to use, that would imply at least one or the other was not humans. Moreover, by the time corruption happened, both of the clans transformed. "People of Wu Zhao" is more appropriate phrase.
@@yucheng4947 And that is the level of nuance in translation that requires translators that speak both languages and understand both cultures to find an equivalent that carries the letter and the spirit.
Sorry in advance and just a tiny tiny nitpick here, "仙侠" is written as "Xianxia".
It is always lovely to see Westerners who are into Chinese mythology and being able to share the same wild imaginations, just like how we share the vision of dragons and dungeons. Unfortunately, the diversity of cultures results in difficulty in localization, which can be also observed when many classical Western MMORPGs failed in the Chinese market.
I loved this, especially the overlapping audio at the end. The Raids / combat at end game are seriously fun but it is basically a dead game. For how beautiful it is and the effort the initial developers put into the game, gameforge really botched this localization.
Thought "botching" stuff was Gameforge's thing? 😎
I think "Botched" is an understatement here. Wtf am i listening to?!
The fact that he never breaks out into a laugh or even a giggle while explaining any of this shit is a super power
Lmao
I dont think its all one take :D
I think his videos might be edited and cut together
but what do i know right
Even during the editing though lol
We need some bloopers :D
no that's just called having a good taste in humor
What if you did the whole descriptions-of-actions-in-text thing but then also animated really detailed scenes where they just do something different. Like the narration says "he slaps you on the shoulder" and instead you two shake hands. I feel like you could have a lot of fun with that as a designer.
18:00 reminds me of one of the first quests in Blade & Soul where a healer says one of his patients will be paralyzed for life because he doesn't have the medicine he needs and no one is available to help. But the medicine is obtained by running to the beach less than 200 feet away.
wow, crazy that you posted this. I was JUST thinking yesterday, "I wonder when Josh is going to cover SOLO." I had been wanting to play for a long time but didn't want to buy it, so I've been playing it the past few days now that it's free. It's definitely not for everyone, but I'm enjoying it so far...in part because I used Chinese VO from the start, and the storyline playing through Fox Mage is actually pretty interesting.
edit: now that I'm watching further, I'm honestly blown away by how different the story is when you're not playing fox mage. it's like a totally different game. it seems like the storyline for the older classes is way more confusing and unpolished.
Yeah all the awful voice work and subs aside, the story for the new classes is decent. Here's the problem: that story ends after an hour or so, and then you're just right back into the dull-as-shit main game. It's basically just a separate prologue.
Expansion classes skip the first few zones to have a shorter story. Both of them merge at Chang'an, or couple small quests before that in Zhongnan but you only get a couple small quests to lead you to Chang'an and the actual zone of Zhongnan is left for later.
ye i'm playing fox mage
Well, we're getting a heavily condensed version of the original game that's been going for years in China. Even at launch, the leveling experience was considered bad in China, and it's only gotten worse since then. Developers simply didn't want to put too much time into it, and it was never revamped to a serious degree outside of shortening it, and making the content easier and faster.
Actually the storyline of Floral Palace duo is slightly more confusing than the older ones, because canonically their storyline begins at Ch 10 ( that’s why you cannot play chapter 10 as fox mage) their storyline is not getting together at the end of chapter 9 .
This is the first game in your entire series that actually made me _angry_ during its cutscenes. I'm honestly kind of impressed that it managed to transcend simple mediocrity and low effort and instead create something so unexpectedly and genuinely irritating. I would have probably alt+F4'd the game midway through the cutscene at around 20:00 and immediately uninstalled it on steam, and then removed it from my library. What an absolute atrocity. Forcing someone to watch all these cutscenes should be classified as torture.
Soy you haven't played FF14. The definition of atrocious mediocrity
@@ROCKNROLL947 Maybe FF14 isn't your thing, maybe it actually is bad (I haven't played it so I don't know), but it can't possibly be as bad as this. This right here is art. The dialogue is full of proper nouns that are unknowable to anyone except perhaps fans of the show, the translation seems to have different definitions for the same exact words which the voice actors read with zero thought or comprehension so even fans wouldn't understand it, lines are getting cut off and overlapping because they took too long to say in English and the whole cutscene is clearly a prerecorded video with zero allowance for longer voiceover from characters. Of course the subtitles don't match up with the voiceover, but in this case it's the least offensive part of this auditory crime against humanity. This is so bad, it would get chewed out if it were a middle school group project, but it's supposed to be a $40 game with AAA graphics. This isn't mediocre, it's mega awful.
@@Hotshot2k4 idk it probably is worse
@@kittenwizard4703 i mean, imo FF14 has prolly one of the best stories in a video game
SUCH DEVASTATION
One big problem I have with a lot of chinese wuxia themes (anime, manhua and games) is there is often this idea of, "special people are special and ordinary people are not, unless they were but it was somehow hidden, so technically they were special all the time." I'm from Taiwan, and this kind of thinking seems kind of insidious to me. Almost like they want people to think people who are well off were always chosen to be special etc, and the normal peeps can just be background characters in their own lives.
Um yes, You just explained how life works..
Welcome to real life? Rich people spend more in a day than you'll earn in your life because the universe ain't fair and never will be.
@@Jokoko2828 But it's not because they're special. They're made of the same stuff as the rest of us. They're only wealthy by circumstance. The trope here is that there are "special people" who *really are* different from ordinary folks, and that's not true in real life at all.
I get what you mean.
@@imperiallarch7610they aren’t different because they’re special, they’re special because they’re different. Being wealthy is the thing that sets them apart.
"I'm now having a conversation with this characters boobs making everyone who was listening in the background pay attention now."
Never been so called out in my life.
Is it being called out if you embrace it?
Same
If I were to guess, I'd say that the VO and the subtitles are different because two different teams were localising them with nobody cross-checking the result.
This genuinely makes me wonder whether MMOs like this are a laundering scheme...
This isn't an uncommon thing in general. Most of the time the reason this happens in DVDs/Blu-rays is because the subtitles are meant to be more literal translations while the voice acting makes changes to fit the mouth movement. In a game like this, most likely they didn't finalize the written script by the time they scheduled the voice actor recording sessions. I'd imagine it mostly boils down to they had very tight timeframes to get things done either because of overconfidence in their own abilities or a management pushing for a deadline either for shareholder or marketing purposes.
Or probably they said to the VOs "Say what u want about martial arts the plot doesn't matter"
This is completely the case, and it's clear that they were working without any context in quite a lot of cases where they get the gender of the characters talking wrong.
My guess is rather voice overs take a lot longer than text translations so they had to send something over to a company that did that for them without the actual translations beeing ready. It's the reason not a whole lot of dialogue is or was voiced in FFXIV because you can't really alter the story and dialogues when voice actors are already working on it
They probably thought "the game is already done how hard can it be to rerecord the lines in english" and just did not bother to check the quality at all
When I first found out about this game, I was really excited as I am a huge fan of Chinese mythology novels. I played the game on release, got to max level, did like 2 weeks of dungeon runs, quit. There was just nothing to keep me interested. Then when the 2.0 update came out, which made the game F2P, I leveled up one of the new classes, got to new max level, did a week of dungeons... and quit again. Still nothing to keep my interest, even a year later. Also, the 40€ I originally spent on the game, wanna know what they gave me after going F2P? Well, they gave me currency which was enough to buy... One outfit :)
oh man I was almost exactly the same, got to stundent 1, did some dungeons, then quit. So, I bought the priciest one and then I stopped playing once I reached the group content wall (and with me being solo player and all). Then outta the blue it went f2p, so I stopped caring. Good to know they only gave ppl who spent money a pat on the back. Truly, avoid anything gameforge.
Someone actually predicted the f2p move during the countdown release cause it was gameforge published, man was given a buncha clown awards on the steam forum and now he's stacked on points and got the hearty last laughs.
Same, though the group content was good fun, there just wasn't enough of it. Shame that JSH didn't get to that part of the game, but we all know he'd then complain about the levelling process being a long, drawn out, glorified tutorial as well as the other complaints.
You also got vouchers for free stuff, a dance and something else, but overall, sure, what exactly shall they give you? They wouldn't need to give you anything. It's absolute normal, that you pay close to nothing for games after a while or even get them for free.
@@Dnote_Z5 They cut it down to give new stuff every 2-4 weeks. Actually it's actually quite rushed, because they try to catch up with the chinese.
I’ve played quite a bit of this game!
You said this game is for people who are “digital tourists” or “cutscene enjoyers”. I am both of those. (Yes. I AM a gw2 player.)
I’m also a casual xianxia fan, who… cannot speak a word of Chinese. I’ve suffered through some BAD localizations, and this is… one of the worst I’ve seen.
I enjoyed my time with it, because I burned a bit of cash to make my handful of characters look pretty- I am big into developing characters and backstory and making them look like they do in my head (it’s uh… a bit of a problem. I have 50 characters in gw2.)
And, the best decision I made, by FAR… was to switch the voice lines to Chinese. Which I did within three minutes of booting up the game. Do I know what they’re saying? Nope. Do I understand the plot? Only through previous knowledge of xianxia tropes and a VERY strong suspension of disbelief. But it sounds a LOT better.
Overall, I definitely had a better time than you did, but I agree wholeheartedly with the review. Great watch!
The overlapping voice acting at the very end got me good man. 10/10.
I actually played this game on release and remember it being bad - but not quite this bad. The endgame content was quite good with excellent combat design and good fights, and the game has a lot of really good systems that work well with each other. Sadly, the story is extremely hard to follow and the localisation alone is enough of an indictment of the game.
“The endgame is good.”
Heard that before bro. Don’t even know why people still say it
@@scotch4890 cause it is? the end game boss fights are well designed the housing system allows for some great builds that someone could easily spend hours on (and if you look at the blueprints from the Chinese community they have)
crafting I'm told exists but i never touched it so i can't comment on that
oh the card games fun as well once you figure out how it actually plays because the localization does not fucking tell you
really the worst two things about this game are the localization and the publisher (and a potential third being ITS USING THE HAVOK VISION GAME ENGINE - a game engine that was discontinued in like 2012 or something)
@@lekoro1 that’s a subjective opinion. I think the game looks horrible and trying to convince me otherwise is pointlessly obtuse
@@scotch4890 those are basically objectively good qualities in a game. Just like this game is objectively showing how bad the cutscenes in the game.
@@slimjong-un5743 I completely disagree with your choice of words. How can you claim that an aspect of a completely subjective experience is objectively true? Consider the endgame experience like macaroni and cheese, some people love it I personally hate it, but it always tastes the same. Same with end games.
In the middle of the "cutscene that does everything wrong," my computer froze and made a constant high-pitched noise. It took me several seconds to realize that it wasn't just another problem with the cutscene.
17:48 - “they are already headed to their graves. We should do that too later!” hahahahahahhahahaa oml did the voice actors become self aware??
Seriously this script is like the Oblivion NPCs became semi-sentient, read a whole bunch of google translated Chinese literature, and then randomly wrote up a game based solely on that. amazing
Also it said something was successfully accomplished (hurting the deku tree?) but the father's quest was already done. Was that why they wanted to die? I was so confused! 😂
When the dude interrupts the elder-ish seeming guy by yelling "Grandmaster!" while he's talking (around 20:26), I just want the guy to go "Don't interrupt!" and maybe slap him. I get that the timing must have matched with the original audio, but yeah... someone on the dub team obviously needed to be given control of the dialogue timing, and wasn't.
@@hazukichanx408 Yeah, if you play any other game with lip sync to chinese audio you'll see chinese dialogue is usually a fair amount shorter in technical length.
Honestly, I don't think your idea is too far off from reality.
I saw a mudcrab the other day. Nasty little creatures.
It's kind of sad, because I feel like there was a lot of potential for a decent game, maybe even a good game, but some people along the corporate chain dropped the ball or made some whacky decisions. I bought this on Steam when it first came out and I don't even think I played a second day before uinstalling and never touching again T_T Love this series by the way, been enjoying it while semi-afk horse training in BDO on a lazy Sunday. Cheers Josh! omg your "out of 10" outro was so good for this one I literally laughed out loud.
If I'm ever rich enough to buy Gameforge I am replacing every team leader, manager, etc then rebuilding all these games that deserved so much better.
I like your thinking.
Game forge is the worst thing the Germans have ever done.
You won't be if you have to say that.
josh: feels like the voice actors were made to read the script without knowing anything about the story.
me: you literally described how the chinese english dubbing scene works (yes china has studios that dub anime to english)
learned this random info after watching ladybeard describe how he worked in the dubbing scene in taiwan...or was it Hong Kong, i cant remember
Uhm, but china doesn't make anime.
@@kiddhkane
Yes they do?
@@kiddhkane if you read it properly, I said they DUB anime. which means they dub japanese made anime into chinese and english.
Also, they have been making their own anime for years. The first one that I saw and loved was The King's Avatar. Still waiting for season 3.
edit: unrelated to the reply...rewatched ladybeard's interview and he was dubbing in hongkong.
@@kiddhkane china doesn’t make “Anime” but they do make Donghua which is just the same things as anime a.k.a Animations
Is lady beard still in that band, deadlift lolita?
"Have you ever been so angry you just suddenly spoke Chinese?"
What, you think I haven't seen Firefly?
*_Obligatory angry Amy Wong chinese catchphrase from Futurama_*
As a player that played at launch until the first raid released, I can tell you, later down the line, the game does get a bit more difficult in terms of open world content, the story stays confusing as all hell, the voice acting stays the same, and there is many many other female npcs with male voices. The raid content is... fine, it wasn't some mega giga experience, but was far from bad, it took my guild a couple attempts for each boss except the last one it was an enrage timer boss that we just needed to push harder dps for and it took time to practice out when we want to pop our cds for what phases and when we can do good dmg as it became a bullet hell at some points and dps became secondary to survival, but some big cooldowns would pop at that same time. the housing, crafting, pets, mounts and all that seems to be just flair in terms of progression, pve and pvp gear in the endgame was separate from what i can remember and was grinded in similar fashion to wow with you spamming rbg to obtain currency and gear boxes. All in all it wasn't an ultra bad experience, but it didn't really excel at anything other than perhaps doing combat a bit better than it's competition in terms of pvp balance.
The voice lines and story were memeable, the gameplay was serviceable, and I only stopped playing because the population got obliterated. The housing system is beautiful. The things I saw people make with it was masterful. I wish an actual publisher would pick it up.
I loved this game for the theme and the style, since I love the Chinese ideal of Cultivation. But yeah, the regionalization was a little.... bad. It gets funny when you listen to just how phoned in some lines are or when an NPC starts in one language then changes to Chinese because they have not finished doing the translations. I'm just surprised you didn't use the one cutscene when the character starts their lines in English then mid word the Chinese voice takes over. The one you used with the sword in the temple makes sense though; he hit him so hard his voice actor forgot English!
I think they fixed this in release, but during the last beta weekend I had a character's VA gender change mid-cutscene, on top of the language flip flopping. It was pretty wild.
I wish there was a genuinely good game single player or mmo with a proper cultivation system. It's been becoming one of my favorite types of fantasy lately and I think it'd be cool if a western developer took hold of the concept and ran with it.
@@LukeshakeProductions if you ever find any do tell, i'd be curious to check it out
@@LukeshakeProductions Amazing Cultivation Simulator is probably the closest right now.
Just learn Chinese bro.
Josh Strife Hayes: "This was based on a popular TV series that was based on Kung Fu movies and Chinese lore"
Also Josh Strife Hayes: "Why do they have elements of Kung Fu movies and Chinese lore in this game. This is confusing to me."
Tinfoil hat theory: The reason they did not bugfix, is because they were forbidden to do a more intrusive cash shop. Totally would expect such petty behaviour.
"You can animate what you want to have happen! Just have the model slap me on the shoulder in-game!"
They couldn't fit that animation into their strict 88-gigabyte budget.
I knew going in the game would have pretty bad English voice acting. I noticed a lot of Asian MMOs don't put much effort into the English voices. Started the game with the voice in Mandarin. I enjoyed the game for the most part, didn't finish the main questline mostly bc its just too large of a game and I needed the space.
Having played something like Thronebreaker, yeah, it's night and day
Specifically wuxia themed games, and not just limited to mmo. My chinese friends told me that wuxia is almost impossible to translate because it uses so many idioms and proverbs.
Yeah I 100% would have played with Mandarin voices and read subtitles because holy crap this was bad.
SOLO was the biggest disappointment in years for me, I hoped ffxiv would get a decent competitor, but poor localisation, boring gameplay and uninteresting classes quickly crushed my illusions :-(
i've been trying to find something to play in between FFXIV updates and ... nothing has been able to touch that special feeling FFXIV gives you when playing.
@@NGNetwork1 Honestly, play different genres, XIV has spoiled me so much with its mechanics that I can't get into other mmos anymore lol
@@AdumskaH True FF14 spoils one so much. I just play other games inbetween nowadays like Elite Dangerous or TD Legion. Just some chill games lul
@@NGNetwork1 best thing with mmos is not to look for the exact same experience but enjoy the games for what they are.
some recommendations I can make are:
guild wars 1 -fun old school game
guild wars 2 cool world to explore
WoW classic/wrath of the lich king(when it comes out)- the original MMO experience,
Blue Protocol looks like the best new MMO coming out
@@devin6968 Assuming Blue Protocol ever comes out lmao.
The Line Furrys and Gene-Stealers killed me XD
Also for the non-sensical Plot, if you have read enough Wuxia Novels or Xianxia Novel this Plot line is as common as the European "Aktion hero go shoot guys" or any other well known cliche plot line.
It was honestly neither suprising nor new in any shape way or form. The way they just throw stuff at you is like they expect you to know all the Wuxia terms and tropes already.
Sounds like the most generic possible Wuxia storyline, I agree
Ya know, I'm amazed at how many MMOs exist at this point. It's really something how companies keep crapping these things out in hopes of making money. It can't be the best way to go about it, considering how many of them are just so mediocre at best.
I wonder how many servers in data centres are dedicated to running niche MMOs that have a consistent playerbase of like 100 people.
That's the thing though, with so many mmos why are there so many shit ones?
@@Nixrubin Well, I can only imagine that it takes the right talent and leadership to get such a large, complex game right. What Josh shows us is that many of them get some things right and some things wrong, making for an overall flawed playing experience.
So I decided to give it a shot and see what's up for myself. A few interesting points:
- It's funny, but judging from the gameplay in the video, he hasn't actually got past the tutorial yet. It tells you tutorial complete after a certain point, and if you watch cutscenes it actually takes forever to get there. I have to say, I did not like that, just too long for me.
- I decided to do a Chinese dub playthrough and guess what, the "English" client version is scuffed to the point that random English dubbing appears during "Chinese dub with Eng sub" cutscenes.
- It's a VERY story driven game with a lot of context from the previous games, the genre itself and culture that I don't think anyone in the West will really understand nor should they be assumed to understand. It is based on the tv show, with multiple prequel games, steeped heavily in the xianxia genre and Chinese culture, there's quite literally ZERO hope for the common person in the West to actually understand what the hell is going on if they just jump in.
- It is very traditional, fetch this fetch that.
- Gameforge completely destroyed the English version it's THE dumpster fire of dumpster fires for a steam release.
- Something positive, the graphics are very nice actually and the player housing construction is actually pretty awesome too. The building is like building a PoE hideout, but way better. There's verticality and scaling an asset up and down and rotating in any direction you want. Actually very cool and awesome. Since you can fly on a sword you can just fly around your "house" if you will. I didn't get far enough to see what you could actually do with housing but from a decorative standpoint, very cool.
- Later on, it's actually a struggle to kill things in comparison to the one shots early on which I thought was also stupid, but I guess this was outside the tutorial levels or something like that.
- The game is actually pay for time in China, meaning it's not a sub per say, you pay for how many hours you want to play and then you can just play that at any time. It's also not P2W in China which is probably why it's doing so well there too.
- The game isn't fully released in the West, looks like they're adding content like more raids and dungeons as they go, too bad the base quality is so bad, again thanks to Gameforge I guess since they were responsible for the English localisation.
- In the end, the housing is the only thing that I think could make me stay so far. Boss mechanics are okay so far, but I haven't really done all of them just yet either.
It doesn't help that we live in a culture of diversity hires, simply for the sake of diversity, many of whom have little to no previous experience. The best games are typically made by people who either played a plethora of games from the same genre and improved upon other's mistakes, or they take those concepts and reimagine them(similar to FF14 2.0). It's important to have people with the ability to implement those ideas. It also helps to have the resources to do so.
Just for example, I grew up playing Final Fantasy games. While I loved the idea of playing a hero, the thought occurred to me one day that having the ability to play through two different story lines would not only add to gameplay time, but also story depth. You could finish the game first as the protagonist, and then play through as the antagonist. Of course back then, a very limiting factor was cartridge/disk space, and the Playstation version of those games were already 3-4 disks long. Implementing that idea into an MMO would take a little more imagination, and far more resources/ability than I currently have. This where is where brainstorming by multiple people who love the genre and have the ability to implement their ideas plays a key role.
I was so hoping his /10 review would be EXACTLY what it ended up being. Well don mr hayes
"Why was it not the hottest new MMO?"
*shows the horrific voice acting*
I fail to see how this is a downside.
It's like dynasty warriors
If they'd played their cards right they could've done a game that plays like the old Hong Kong martial arts movies. Not the best translation, but decent and fun. But that is not what they did.
voice acting do make a difference and can be a make or break for some people and first impressions MATTERS
@@kuro9410_ilust //woosh
they should double down and make it like ghost stories
God SOLO.
I played the closed beta and then for a good chunk of a year after the release, and the most memorable thing for me was the utter mindbreak I experienced as the game itself just broke the concept of translation itself. This is coming from someone who regularly Google translates Chinese novels. It got so bad that I was screenshotting every line of dialogue because I was in stitches from howling too hard. There were multiple instances where *people's names* in *the name box* got translated. To different degrees.
I remember going back to Cloudrise to talk to Lushu Zidu (whose name is occasionally partially translated to Lushu Purple City) and Kunwuzi (whose name is occasionally accidentally partly Japanese-read...? to Kungozi. I have no idea how) to unlock Baxian area. And. I was greeted with this:
"(Suddenly discouraged) Even you help he ...Well, if you can please take out the Wuxianzhan on the top of Sendaitai and drink a sip of the Xia Niu, I'm afraid there is still a glimmer of life."
The devs asked for people to "be respectful" when bringing forward criticisms but frankly for a game that I had to pay to play, the fact that this level of """"translation""" that makes less sense to read in "English" than in Chinese is in of itself disrespectful-- and I can't even read Chinese. Actually, I have the game to thank for my better Chinese now, because I WAS invested enough to just look up the original Chinese texts to better understand the lore.
That said, now that the game is dead, I wish there's a game with similar aesthetic and style to fill the void... I really do adore the atmosphere, though I wished there were places for me to actually appreciate the gorgeous areas without always attracting mobs.
In my experience anything that has to do with Chinese Martial Arts fantasy, be it video games, manhua, TV dramas, etc., gives little to no in depth explanation about the fundamentals of the lore. They seem to just expect you to have a baseline level of knowledge. Kind of a "Everyone knows what a goblin is." Sort of thing.
Well the game is for chinese first i guess
The game is based on a Chinese drama yeah?
Then it's kinda obvious the devs expected you to understand the lore, world and everything else from that
Comment above me got it right, its based on a Drama. The game expects you to bring its base knowledge, but yeah its no good for people who dont know shit about it.
I've read several Chinese fantasy web novels. They all explained mechanics and lore of their worlds in enough depth for me to understand it. Prior to reading those I knew basically nothing about the genre or Chinese mythology.
@@Nekoszowa it's not based on a drama, it's the mmo of the GuJian games.
The drama was based on the games.
This is the forth game in series
I haven't played this game, but as someone familiar with Chinese MMOs, here's a few explanations on how these things come to be:
The overlapping voices: Like most languages, better vocabulary can often make phrasing more dense and precise. When Chinese dialogue is written for a literary flair, they often use a poetic phrasing that also adds some flourish, so you have the combination of dense information balanced with flourish. The people they hire to translate often don't bother to, or cannot translate this which balances out a little, but it's not enough to shorten the timing. To put it into perspective, Chinese uses only a single syllable per word, so without giving a foreign VA any indication of timing and not bothering to alter the cutscenes will lead to that.
Convoluted story: This is 50% genre and 50% cultural. If a work of fantasy explained that a king has failed to draw the sword from the stone, you're probably suddenly aware it's Arthurian fantasy, and also understand the intrigue in that only the true king of Britain can draw the sword. Would this pop-cultural context not be present, none of that would make sense. Here's an example, in the cutscene where everyone is holding back the demon, one of the dudes starts resisting something and the explanation given is that he's a Mohist. This is a real philosophy that bears impartial care, depending on if or what additional context is given, this can mean the demon is less evil and more just there and innately dangerous, but not 'deserving' of being slain, the means of slaying the demon is unnecessarily cruel, or unleashing said means is a greater evil to him. From what I can tell, the sword turned him evil and affected his conscience. That's also why he's 'gifting' the sword around. Chinese people are understandably well-steeped in the rules of their fantasy. The issue with the genre is that in a way, it's built on this convolution, it is a heavenly bureaucracy after all, basically, godlike awesome beings are everywhere, but they're not just solving every problem because of equally cosmic things they are constantly attending to on top of layers upon layers of red tape.
Chinese players: Native Chinese MMO players are often very different. Because negatives are more likely focused, they're often known as pay for power or convenience people because they didn't develop a stigma against that early on - "I have a job: I can't play as much, but I have money. Why can't I buy what I couldn't grind?" is a very logical thought process. But there's another aspect in that a Chinese playerbase can be very devoted lore junkies. If an MMO is popular in China, there's like a gazillion fan-written stories floating around, and lore being in written form outside of the game comes a lot more naturally. What you get is a playerbase that is split into people who will never pay attention to the plot in the first place and just want to see numbers go up and people who are extremely good at contextualizing what they see. This has unfortunately encouraged a sometimes hackneyed writing style that leaves gaps for these fan works by lazy companies.
As a bonus, I'll decipher the 26:08 cutscene.
"My big brother let me come here" - This can often refer to a sworn brother or an upperclassman which in this genre is often in the context of a martial arts school. In fact, the approaching student calls the master "brother" at the end of the cutscene, so what's lost in translation is that the master being spoken to is actually the elder brother, the student is simply using that term to refer to him.
"During the duel... Taibai and Shenmai accupuncture points... Was it not your intention" - The master punched the other guy in a certain way and despite how they look, they are manlier than you and can talk with their fists. I am not kidding. First of all, both points are on the foot, which is not a point you usually aim to attack or do on accident. The Shenmai point represents stability and coordination, the Taibai point... is the Taibai point, but more importantly, there is an actual Mt. Taibai which apparently is where they're at. Not only that, Taibai is the immortal associated with Venus, so the master communicated a time as well. Because it was a friendly duel between master and student, the student inferred it's possible this meant something and interpreted it correctly. If this student gets better he and the master can probably just forego verbal communication and just punch each other.
"Swordsmanship is easy to learn, but beautiful jade is seldom seen" - Jade symbolizes righteousness. Translation: 'Anyone can train to kill stuff with sharp things, but in my house you ought to also train your character.'
This scene characterizes the master character as someone morally upright, and depending on what 'brother' his student was, he's either caring of his students, or has an actual brother or sworn brother in the other character - Likely the first, since he remarks on hoping his students take care in light of an oncoming disaster. People who learn his techniques are probably also taught to fight evil, so they would be in the line of danger. Furthermore, he can talk with his fists. Because he's subtle. Judging from the nature of the tutorial Josh gets after learning his stuff where you're meant to not hit the crystals, it's further storytelling since being concerned with not hitting targets implies he's training people to not friendly fire and to be mindful of where their attacks go.
As for why his techniques seem less useful to Josh's character, it's either related to build or maybe the game has some convoluted chi cultivation system that would modify it. I wouldn't know though, haven't played.
Call on me if you're ever curious about these Chinese lore convolutions, Josh. It won't matter in terms of rating a game for western audiences, but hey, maybe you're curious.
This was quite interesting to read and contextualizes the bizarre choices made in the localization. With a bit more care, the kind of care that a dedicated, scholarly, bilingual translation team would take, the important subtext that we missed as western gamers not inured in Chinese mythology and literary tropes could have been better fleshed out to the player and result in a richer story experience.
Hope Josh sees this comment as well.
Thank you for this. The audio and localization complaint is valid - but I feel like the entire video was focused on this to "market" this review video.
There are huge cultural aspects to this type of chinese xianxia/wuxia genre that you can tell Josh did not research - i.e "kung fu with some chinese lore". No sir this is aint jackie chan the mmo.
Now the game obvious throws you into the deep end right away with this culture shock, and that's definitely one of the major flaws of this game. And new players that don't understand this genre should be rightfully confused and annoyed at what seems to be a strange story - but as a reviewer I expect more research and helping to educate the masses on such a topic.
I tried playing this for 2 weeks. the colors of the text confused me to, but it is class specific text! it marks what dialogue changes based on class you play
15:28 I finally figured out what is going on. They not only spent 5 bucks on the dub people but the translation from Chinese is literal. That is the reason Baiqian says "we can't control that guy anymore!"
One of your closing statements really reminded me of why I love The Lord of the Ring Online. Your character isn't the chosen one. You're an adventurer that deals with events that surround the story of the Fellowship. You meet the Fellowship several times and eventually become an integral part of it, answering to characters like Gandalf and Aragorn (among others). And there are recurring characters (though sometimes years apart in the game's development) and a lot of decent writing (even if some quests are not worth reading). Since you mentioned stage direction, Lotro does have some, though not terribly often.
I do remember the opening where you're trying to help Aragorn (as Strider) to save a person after they got stabbed with a morgul blade, but you couldn't stop it and they succumbed, turning into a wraith as well. Definitely a sadge moment
Is the game still alive? I remember playing it a long time ago.
@@samtar2756 it is, i just played it yesterday.
new update also just rolled out, expanding on the trollshaws and introducing a new class i believe?
@@samtar2756 It is and they're still putting out expansions. I'm hoping he'll cover LotRO soon because they're changing their F2P model with the next major patch and making it free to play all content released up to Helm's Deep (so about level 95) and up to the latest expansion with a subscription.
@@TheBonkleFox The ranger became a new baby Cargûl. Frodo would've become one too if he hadn't made it to Elrond in time. A hobbit-sized evil spirit.
19:17 - this scene should be used in game design courses as exam. Find all the mistakes and improve it or fail
Glad I didn't spend the $40 on this when it came out 😂 I thought the graphics looked good but a lot of eastern mmos that come to the west have poor English voice acting and poor cutscene optimization. Whenever I play games like this I use the Chinese/japanese/Korean voice over instead of the english 😂 I hate when the voice over overlaps with the next voice line or cuts off short and goes to the next line.
The voice acting layering over eachother like this reminds me a lot of when I visited a supermarket in Japan, where they had little speakers all over the place to advertise all sorts of products. Sensory overload - but it seemed normal to everyone else °-°;
Honestly pretty good simulation what it's like if you got a sensory processing disorder lmao. Being in public can be like that for me.
13:58 "The game literally just told me if I touched it, I would die. And now I am inside it."
Obviously: you touched it, you died, and now you're a ghost.
"I am convinced none of the voice actors were given indications of character or situations or setup".
This was my thought as well.
The performances seem to have nothing to do with the characters they are performing. For some of these it's like they were given a drawing of a character from a zany cartoon show like The Fairly OddParents and told that's who they were.
If the actors just had to make their best guess based upon the text of the dialogue, it's very possible they thought they were making a cartoon or comedy.
I laughed so much watching this. I am convinced that this MMO is a masterpiece if you look at it as a parody.
when the npc's start cutting each other at 19:20 i just couldn't hold myself XD
I cried when Josh said "We can devour the gods together" 😭😭 33:04
33:07 was not expecting a Praetor Rykard line, that made me laugh out loud.
We need Elden Ring review from him
Togethaaaa
Looking for ambitious, martially skilled individuals willing to participate in a group God-devouring exercise. Must be family-oriented and be unbothered by warm environments and snakes. Inquire with Rya.
4:45 This is very accurate for a lot of games actually, not just ones like this. Voice actors will be given an excel spreadsheet of lines or something similar to record, and just go through them with no real idea what's happening.
@Team Rocket's Slowpoke a good example is the last of us. atleast in the first one (dont know about the second) dialoge is voiced TOGETHER. this meant they had to cast voiceactors who have at least a bit of chemistry, but the results are awesome and worth the work.
@@the4given196 Comparing localization and original voice acting is comparing apples to oranges. Chinese voice actors probably knew what they were voicing.
@@the4given196 The Last of Us part 2 took it a step further, where all actors are together at all time even if they have no dialogue. Both TLOU games had the actors doing mo-cap in suits for most of the acting
@@Carstein666 i know there is a big difference, i just wanted to give an example on how dialoge voicing should be done.
I remember playing the beta - the game didn't have the English Voice acting in beta, so I created a thread asking what's up in which the game's harcore community attacked me for questioning it.. Interesting how things turn out..
It's a shame how genuinely gorgeous this game is visually. One of the best looking MMOs I've ever seen when it comes to environments.