If you’d asked me how I felt about Ignition Entertainment at E3 last year, I would have been fairly optimistic – the company genuinely seemed “in it to win it”, grabbing Muramasa away from XSEED and focusing on a social media push that worked pretty damn hard to spread the word and help that title perform long after its release.
Even now, the willingness of gamers to love a bad game for being bad, as in the case of Deadly Premonition, makes it appear as if Ignition is on the ball.
But let’s talk about Arc Rise Fantasia.
Siliconera posted IGN video from the game yesterday, with a pessimistic appraisal of the work so far seen in the dub of the title – producing a landslide of comments from gamers who have every right to rage when a game that is anticipated is so instantly derailed by an apparent lack of respect for the source material.
What remains is some of the worst voice-over work I’ve yet heard in a videogame, and I survived two Magna Carta titles.
I don’t use the phrase “affront to God” often, but I’m backed against a wall here – particularly when the potential for XSEED to have done an English voice track while still offering the original Japanese one was on the table.
But don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself after the break – and please give your own two cents, because it’s increasingly obvious that feedback from you needs to be continually ringing in the ears of people who let things like this happen. And also because the possibility of Ignition handling Heroes’ Paradise at this point makes me feel a bit ill.