Verdict non-spoiler after 15 hours. The opening 5 hours are trash. You're confronted with hideous voice acting, characters with literally no graphics on their faces (no textures) and an unfathomable combat system.

After that it gets better and better. Once you get the first open world bit its excellent and you start to understand it, though usually through finding things out yourself and the voice acting improves. The main 3 characters are well voiced. I'm not going to switch it to Japanese audio because I really like Rex and Nia. Love a good dialect.

Agree with your post, not quite as far as you, but the opening act, especially the first 2 hours is a slog. I even questioned my decision to buy it at some point but I pushed on & I'm glad it did. Game & battle system are feckin mint.

Dogfingers wrote:

The main 3 characters are well voiced. I'm not going to switch it to Japanese audio because I really like Rex and Nia. Love a good dialect.

Me neither, would miss the open world/battle banter.

Can you record some for my amusement?

Rex has some crackers, MAYBE I AM THE BEST.

The voice acting isn’t that bad, it’s no worse than most JRPGs, so if you don’t like that then you aren’t going to like this. I will stick out the English VO and hopefully will get better like dogfingers stated.

So far I’m really enjoying the game, it seems like it’ll take a while to kick into gear, but that’s par for the course with Xeno titles and JRPGs in general, just have to stick with it.

Would have jumped in at the Argos price but I thing I'll hold fire for a bit.

You owe me £30.

Is this a reasonable price anywhere on the high street? Tempted to pick it up in town.

Nah, that went incredibly fast. Back to £50 there now.

Budget will be a big part of it, aye.

Paul the sparky wrote:

You owe me £30.

Am I still getting the blowie though?

Good lad

I find it hard to believe some of them are 'actors', more like 'work experience staff'

Raiziel wrote:

The worst possible voice acting probably comes from recording lines in isolation.

That hasn’t harmed most major animation studios’ output.

Andy wrote:

I liked the. Accent that. Rex was.

Voiced with in the. English version. But the weird... pauses in his. Delivery were off.

Putting.

Shopkeeper’s broken English work written down but not work when native English speaker do voice, methinks.

I got that far before downloading the Japanese voices. I’m never a huge fan of the overblown, melodramatic delivery and frequently poor casting (voices that just don’t belong in the character’s body) but it’s a significant improvement.

I agree with both of these points. The weird pause Rex does is offputting and the ponpon (I think) characters speech is stupid when read aloud. Coincidentally someone should have told this fact to the makers of the walking dead tv series about the idiots who live at the tip. It’s fine when written down but said out loud it is fucking stupid. ‘Me get guns, you have guns. Me want’ etc

I digress.

This game is good fun and the voice acting is an improvement on the first game and is pretty good judging by JRPG standards but that means it’s still not great.

Also. I like the voice of the welsh woman who has the tiger, best so far.