I'm pretty sure you would still have to pay the VAs for their work. Hiring someone to give a voice for an anime character doesn't necessarily mean you have license to use that sound wherever you please.
That was the biggest criticism? The main things I kept seeing over and over were the dex cut and the graphic quality. The only time I ever saw criticisms about voice acting was in reference to the scene with Piers, not the whole game/
Was this confirmed somewhere? Because I really don't see how the game seems designed to have voice acting any more than any other Pokemon game.
But you would need to pay for the rights to use it, and you'd need someone to check the quality of them.
I would argue that if a developer really had voice acting in mind, they wouldn't make the majority of their game's dialogue in the same format as their previous games that lacked dialogue.
Uh... I have seen other games that do this and not necessarily have voice acting (or prominent one, anyway).
When I was little, I tried to hear every Pokémon's names in their cries.
Paper Mario, Stardew Valley, Lisa, Undertale... It definitely strikes me as more of a stylistic choice than something I'd consider lacking in a game.
A lot of major games that do have voice acting don't even read every line, though. Most Mario games- Odyssey, Mario Kart, Luigi's Mansion, etc, Splatoon, Animal Crossing, Kirby...
That's really not that uncommon a philosophy. Some people enjoy that about other mediums, too, like preferring books to visual adaptations, or podcast creators intentionally leaving visual details out so listeners can imagine what they want. This is just a conscious choice to remove it rather than a limit of the medium.
Literally every game has done lip flaps since the jump to 3D. This ain't new.
I would say since before that since I remember older games with that.
I was just trying to think of popular RPGs off the top of my head lol. I listed the indie games because they're still pretty well-known, so it wasn't like I was hunting down something obscure like Crystal Monsters and holding it up as an example. Why don't you give a list yourself if you have a problem with my examples? You keep saying that "it's the modern standard", "every game does it", but you've only just now mentioned Dragon Quest as an example of an RPG that features voice acting, and you haven't listed any others.
Yes, but as I said in my post, Mario's "Hoo! Hah!" is not quite the same amount of voice acting as having an actor read dialogue, or even speaking a gibberish language like in the Sims or Animal Crossing. Also, even in Mario games, when there's actual dialogue from characters, like Cappy or Bowser, it's left as text on the screen.
I mean, they got the fifth-best selling game on the Switch with that, so I don't really see how they're not getting away with it.
That assumes Game Freak puts their focus on scoring from critics. As you said yourself, Dragon Quest is less successful. (Specifically, it's gotten about 1/3 the sales SwSh has) So why should they be modelling their game after something much less successful?
