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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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The legacy of the tidus laugh forever stains all emotional moments in videogame cutscenes.

I really hate how people latched onto the Tidus laugh as "bad voice acting". The first time I played the game, it was clear that it was meant to be the character laughing in a forced, fake way. One can argue whether that's a good thing to have in a scene, but it isn't the VA's fault that he executed the script he was given.

The VA (James Arnold Taylor) has explicitly said it was intentional. FFX's real issue with the story (even though I love it) is that none of it makes sense until you get about 95% of the way through the game, and even then you had to really be paying attention and piecing things together to make sense of it (and even then there are plot holes and nonsensical bits).

none of it makes sense until you get about 95% of the way through the game

This is true of pretty much all Final Fantasy stories. Actually the FF series is an interesting case study for this topic, seeing as games have been consistently released for the past 30 years with many of the same people involved again and again.

yeah, seriously! It's amazing how the entire internet latched onto that one scene, out of context, and completely misinterpreted it. The voice acting was fine. It was just a big change, getting used to having so much dialogue and all of it voiced.