Reasons of a non voice acted game

[Dokken]

Recently, I've redownloaded Sengoku Rance, because I wanted to do the IF routes. But I always wondered what was the reasons that a VN, isn't voice acted. Is this a question of budget ? Certainly Sengoku Rance is a quite huge game (all Rance's games though), but is one of the most famous VN. I heard that Rance serie saved AliceSoft from bankruptcy.. Well I don't know if that's true, but voices may be the only things that this game lacks. Even Monster Girl Quest, found an alternative by acting only important Alice scenes. Impatiently waiting for Rance Quest.

[Nosebleed]

Is this a question of budget ?

Yes.

[Flutterz]

Voices are pretty expensive to do as it is IIRC, plus as the VN gets longer you can reuse sprites and backgrounds more and more, but you can't really reuse voice acting (unless you have a character whose only line is "ONII-CHAN ONII-CHAN ONII-CHAN"), so it can get even more taxing on the budget. And if you only voice certain lines it ends up being kind of jarring, so it's generally better to have no voice acting than incomplete/low quality voice acting.

[madvanced]

Yes it's mostly a question of budget

 

(unless you have a character whose only line is "ONII-CHAN ONII-CHAN ONII-CHAN"),

[Narcosis]

Nowadays, VA is the most expensive part within the development process, be it games, visual novels or anime. As stated above, the longer the game, the more taxing it gets on the budget; this is why very long games tend to have unvoiced chapters or remain only partially voiced. Although the main reason is often tied to financial and time constraints (rushed release dates), some games tend to leave the voicing out of different reasons. Not all visual novels require voice acting; I'd even go as far to say not a single one of them needs to be voiced and while voice acting is always a nice addition the art and writing themselves are the major tools which immerse the readers. Certain visual novels vary in aesthetics as well and some works might simply consider VA an unnecessary adition.

[Toranth]

Many years back, I played a game where all the females were voiced - except one. Only once you'd finished some route did that character's voice start to play.

The reason for it is kinda vague, but I seem to remember that it was something like the unvoiced character was actually the same person as a supposedly different voiced character, so the game hid the voices from you until that plot point had been revealed.

It didn't work very well then, and I've never seen it again.

[Dokken]

Thanks all for your answers, well too bad then. this is kind of " atmosphere breaking " for me.

[Nimbus]

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5pDz-HrWcs

Urge to kill..... rising!

[Regenerate]

I know how you feel. When I played Sengoku Rance a couple years ago as one of my starting eroges, I didn't even bother with VA because it was a relatively expensive and unnecessary component to the quality of the VN. But now, after playing all of these VNs that do have VA, when I went back to play it just a couple of weeks ago, it seemed to pale in comparison to the VNs that did have VAs. It costs a lot, and even then I think now it is a standard to have VA or else your game will sink due to the growing galge industry. Compared to how popular galge games are now, to what they were before, you could even say that it is an industry accompaniment that galge should have voice acting for it be of "quality". Although Sengoku Rance will always be the title that introduced me to the VN novel, I can't say that I could even play it a second time if it doesn't have VA. After all, we're all growing too... In certain places. ;D

[Deep Blue]

Yes it's mostly a question of budget

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5pDz-HrWcs

I think I want to kill her...no...I'm possitive.

[Clephas]

You don't see many doujin games with voices (except in h-scenes), because of the cost...

[Zodai]

From a development perspective, it can help if you have money, but once you decide to do it getting voice acting that is more helpful than harmful requires exponentially increasing costs, and this gets even higher with longer games.  Personally, this is money and time better spent making the writing better in and of itself, and rewriting text becomes even more difficult once you have voice acting to go along with it.  Most of the time it's simply too infeasible a route to take, though it's easier if the project is a port or remaster of sorts.  (Umineko's PS3 version, for example.)

 

Logical conclusions state that the best conclusion is to try to get the writers to put the voice through in the text - this certainly isn't an easy task, but it's preferable to hiring a cast of voice actors for each individual character.  That, and you need strong writers to make something like a VN work to begin with, so if you've done things right this is less of an issue.

[OriginalRen]

Interesting. I thought voice acting in anything animated (be it a film or VN or whatever) is based on a set contracted salary, not based on the number of lines spoken.