Please, no....
"At the event, SquareSoft officially confirmed that Final Fantasy X will not include the alternate Japanese voice track, so players will only have access to the English voices and subtitles."
NO! Oh man, my worst fear has been realized. I am a huge proponent of outlawing dubbing. I know this topic is supposed to be about screenshots and whatnot, but to me this is horrible news.
I have been watching anime since I was 6 years old. Probably sooner than that, although I might not have known it at the time. And one thing I can say is, dub jobs suck. I have seen a LOT of dubbed anime, and it is all terrible. Not only are the voice actors just pitiful, but 9/10 huge important pieces of information or just general emotional or factual conotations are lost. By the time you have a sixty hour long story, all these little pieces add up and often you will end up missing the big picture.
I have also been playing Final Fantasy since I was six...if you read in the ePSXe forums under a topic named something like "which is a better RPG: 7 or 9?" you can find my opinion on nearly all the games.
This however, is an awful blow to me. Although I havent been massively impressed with the games lately, I did have high hopes for FFX. The problem is, I absolutely find dub jobs intolerable. Heck, sometimes the dubbing in an animations original language is pretty awful. Just look at Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. In my humble opinion, the dub job in that movie took it from an average movie down to mediocre. And I happen to love computer graphics at that. (Well, in all fairness the dialog lines the actors were given were pretty sorry...I guess they did the best they could)
But, rest assured, I will be writing square soft as soon as I get done here. If I knew how to start a petition I would. This is simply ridiculous...they have a DVD with up to 4.7 GB capacity, and they cant include the japanese dialog? I know the game is probably quite huge with those detailed wireframes and textures, but still....
Even though it is good to see they got at least one professional voice actor, I really dont see this doing very well. At least, not in my home. I hope Square can and will reconsider thier decsion...it would be so easy to put in an options language select inside the inventory/character status/abilities menu.
Well, thanks for sticking around for this rant if you made it this far...Im off to go and try to find SquareSofts email address. Wish me luck.
TastEPlasma