A partnership in madness

[davidn]

Since their inception a couple of short months ago, kjorteo's weekend broadcasts of Hatoful Boyfriend have become one of the highlights of my week (and, I imagine, a pretty unforgettable weekly experience for everyone else who watches them as well). Initially, we were prepared just to laugh at a charming and slightly tacky pigeon-dating game, but none of us were prepared for just how comprehensively mad this game is in breadth as well as depth - and how it continues to impress and terrify us with how much deeper it's going every time it's turned on.

Once, this was the culmination of the game's madness. Now it's just the tip of the iceberg.

We're now in the sort of Silent Hill possessed darkworld version of the game, which reveals itself when you complete all the other chapters - the game's name changes to Hurtful Boyfriend, the protagonist is killed, with her head stuffed in a box and the rest of her delivered in bite-sized portions to the rest of the school, and you have to play as one of the other characters and investigate the murder like a bird-filled episode of Inspector Morse made with the aid of amphetamines. But this week I was to become a greater part of the insanity - I was away at PAX East on Saturday and so missed our weekly recommended portion of the game, and to make up for it I was coerced (after honestly not a whole lot of convincing) to broadcast my own playthrough as I caught up to the place the others had left off - an effort that spanned five chapters in two one-hour sessions.

Part 1 - A 13-minute pause, some audio-related windows flying around, and then chapters 1-3 (without the introduction)

Part 2 - Chapters 4 to 5 and a half

The game provides you with some Japanese names to imagine as the voices, and a drama CD is or was actually/has been being produced, though this is hardly the time to be conjugating temporal verbs in the past-present impossible never tense (it's sometimes quite difficult to tell what's going on through the author's filter of madness) - though I can't say what the characters were intended to sound like as I do not have a clue who any of these people are. Therefore, my limited ability for impressions was taken frankly to beyond breaking point as I found myself switching rapidly back and forward between various silly accents to narrate a complete cast of frantic talkative pigeons.

• Ryouta: My own unaltered (though increasingly stressed) voice.
  


• Sakuya: I had a lot to live up to for the aloof, contemptuous Sakuya, and started off with my own attempt at the accidental Liquid Snake soundalike that kjorteo had accidentally elevated to classic status, meaning that this was a British person attempting to sound like an American attempting to sound British. This degenerated into just something vaguely posh later on, though I was slightly perturbed to discover on playback that both of these variants left my normal voice basically unchanged.
  


• Kazuaki: I was expecting to have to do snoring noises at least once during this session, but his narcolepsy appears to have been cured for this part of the game! I attempted a sort of doddery, absent-minded Patrick Moore-alike for him, but within about half an hour he had become David Mitchell.
  


• The library bird whose name always escapes me: Squall Leonhart. This was another one that Kjorteo did by accident on first meeting him, and I could only follow suit by sounding dull, despondent and as flat as if he'd just been run over by a steamroller.
  


• Yuuya: After some floundering here, I had tried to give him a calm, floaty sort of Pierce Brosnan lilty voice, only to find that he had now been christened "Stoner Yuuya" in the livestream chat as a direct result of my efforts. That's about as good as this one is going to get.
  


• Shuu: The technique is simple - clamp your teeth together not quite closed, and speak without allowing your lips to touch your gums, drawing out all closed-lip sounds mmmmmmmmmelodramatically. You now sound like Alan Rickman - or at least, like the Potter Puppet Pals' interpretation of Severus Snape.
  


• Oko-san: I was encouraged to do a full Brian Blessed for this energetic dove, but I couldn't oblige because my parents-in-law are staying with us and my basement office is not blessed with a door. After some attempts at that sort of whispered shout that you do when you're giving the impression of shouting without wanting people around you to think you're crazy, I realized someone who was perfect for his obsession with speed and powerrrrr - unfortunately, I only got to use it on the single line he had in the entire second half!
  


• Anghel: Bombastic and a tad insane - as you might expect from those requirements, this immediately turned into Tom Baker (or would have, had I the ability to do so). Now that I come to think of it, he could just as easily be voiced by Sammy Thunder of Limozeen.
  


• One: A bit of a surprise for this one, starting near the beginning of part two. It certainly surprised me when it happened, anyway - apologies once again to Kjorteo, specifically for the distribution of pizza over his monitor and keyboard.

Now I'm looking forward to seeing how everyone else coped with that same session as told through our regular narrator's eyes - something that I'll watch this week before the impending grand finale this weekend. It's been an incredible journey - perhaps we will yet emerge intact.

And then we'll have to do the sequel.

Comments

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Library bird = Nageki, for the record.

Anyway, gonna have to give these a watch when I've got some down time at the hotel this week. Even with the increased bandwidth limit, we're still a bit over where we should be, so I'm saving any major 'Net buffoonery for while it's on someone else's dime. XP

[davidn]

Sounds a good way to spend your time :) The amount of characters with K-syllables at the start and end of their name confuses me sometimes, and I really had to pause and think about who was Kawara versus Kazuaki Nanaki versus Nageki... a lot of the time I just remembered whose voice I was meant to be doing by the tone of the speech!

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Potter Puppet Pals Snape as Shuu... utter, utter genius. :) :P

D.F.

[davidn]

As you can hear from this video, I only have the ability to do about three impressions - I'm working with a very limited selection of voices here and have to match them as appropriately as I can ;)

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Wow, you really did channel Alan Rickman for Shuu. I'm didn't pick your Nanaki voice as David Mitchell, but now that you mention it, that's both obvious and hilarious.

Your Anghel voice, though, is the stuff of legend.

And the whole thing.... wow. Is this even the same game?

[davidn]

The game has become... possessed, at this point - it's hard to remember when we were at the top of this pit, staring down into the Blaster storyline and thinking that that was quite deep down. Now, it's like a nightmare where a game suddenly reveals a completely new route and section, going off the storyline you were told about into something... markedly different. Somehow, that makes it all the more impactful - we fell in love with these characters through the farcical comedy of our introduction to the game, and now we really care about them - these... pigeon cutouts!! ...as they go through real danger. What a game.

Unfortunately, I couldn't really speculate on the storyline too much while playing it because having to swap voices in and out that rapidly really takes your concentration away! (And I frequently messed up whose voice was whose, but I think I got away with it ;) ) David Mitchell hadn't been my intention, it just sort of happened - others... I just had to make up as I went along.

[kjorteo]

Not since the Katamari Damacy games' final levels, which start with having you collect enough coins and pushpins to grow enough to handle keys and spools of thread, and end with your devouring entire continents in anticipation of taking on the solar system, have I seen as much exponential escalation as with the madness in Hatoful Boyfriend.

I remember when I first saw that scene from your screenshot, there. It makes exactly as much sense when viewed in game as that out-of-context screenshot, and I was utterly speechless beyond "wait ... what?" Now, the game has retroactively gone back and explained that bit, in exchange for newer and even bigger piles of nonsense.

Now, I give Anghel a sort of "oh, that's just Anghel being Anghel" pass and dismissal in my head, like he's the Other Okosan or something. I even remember when I that scene as the "oh, trust me, it gets so much worse" bait when you thought Okosan was weird. Now ... it all seems so quaint. Did I really used to think Anghel was the weird part of this game?

Anyway, I give you credit for consciously trying with a lot more of the voices than I ever have! My now-apparently-classic-for-some-reason Pidgeworth voice was really the only character for whom I had a conscious "oh, it's this person's line, I need to switch voices" reaction until we did Library Bird's path. The best part is that I've never even experienced Metal Gear Solid, so what you call a Liquid Snake soundalike is really just my having thought "quick, what sounds stereotypically stuck-up?" and panicking and stumbling into Narcis Prince (whose ... general aura should be fairly obvious even if the only actual voice clips are near-sound effects like "Oh!" and "Grr!") with maybe a little MLP Rarity thrown in. For Library Bird, I went into Squall territory without even realizing that's what it was (fun fact: since part of cutting down any trace of enthusiasm to that level means speaking much more quietly, I actually have to hold the microphone much closer when delivering one of his lines, then return it to normal distance when it's no longer his turn.) Everybirdy else is just various subtle adjustments in pitch and volume, including Okosan (who's just boisterous and loud) and Anghel (who's just Okosan with an extra sense of frightened urgency, like the world will end if you don't listen to him.)

The best performance I ever gave in this game is in Library Bird's ending, when I switched rapidly between Library Bird (dead Squall mode as always, but with an extra subtle tinge of sadness) and Teo (my normal voice except wavering and basically right on the verge of tears.) The secret to that performance is that it ... wasn't one; that was just the ending legitimately being that sad even though I still had to narrate it. Toning everything down for Library Bird's lines was the only tricky part; Teo was pretty much just how I sounded at that point.

The best deliberate performance I ever game in this game is Sakuya's ending, in which I first discovered how fun it is to ... act with him. I'm afraid of making characters sound so silly that it's completely impossible to do a serious scene with them (you'd better hope One isn't involved in any tear-jerker scenes if you stream the ending, too..!) and I was afraid that I had trapped myself in precisely that scenario when I had absolutely no idea how the Pidgeworth voice would work with any line that doesn't begin with "how dare you," but ... I'm actually quite pleased with the end result. Which is fortunate, otherwise BBL thus far would have been completely impossible.

[kjorteo]

Also, since I went through this much of the game first, and experienced as much childhood entertainment as I have without Metal Gear Solid being a part of it, somehow, when you finally did give me a clip of Liquid Snake so I could understand what you were talking about, it really didn't sound like anything except Cam "that voice from every video game and cartoon ever made" Clarke doing the Pidgeworth voice.

Edit: Also also, I should point out that the Narcis Prince (or at least "quick, what kind of accent implies 'snooty'") connection is the only explanation for how such an obvious French-Japanese hybrid (Sakuya Le Bel Shirogane??) ended up English. Obviously he should have sounded more like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w9U__PNaS0 , but too late now! (And there's no way I could have done that, anyway.)

[davidn]

I... never thought of that :) But French people always end up as English for some reason! Like Soul Calibur's Raphael - who... actually, now that I listen, I'm not sure - I had remembered him as very English, but now I'm not sure if I was exaggerating it in my memory due to his general poncey demeanour.

[davidn]

It is with great discomfort that I realize that you can now say "with a little MLP Rarity thrown in" and I will actually know what you're talking about - I hope you're aware of this. It's a wonderful thought that Liquid Snake now just sounds like Pidgeworth to you - there's something like that that happened to me recently because I saw the 'fake' version before the 'real' one, but the exact story is completely escaping me...

I think what I loved about it was just how unexpected it was, something very different and hilariously exaggerated - seeming more so among all your other more subtle differences of inflection for each pigeon's voice (why am I typing these sentences and acting like they make sense). It helped that I, too, had always imagined Edgeworth's voice as like that.

It became less absurd during the serious scenes, but his tone was still there... it's always the comedies that can deliver the most heartwrenching moments, because they've got a greater amount of space in which to have a mood swing. This game made us fall in love with these characters through a unique charming madness, and then threw them into something that, absurdly, we really care about. In that way... (there was a sentence at the end of this paragraph but then I realized I was about to compare a pigeon-dating game to the end of the fourth series of Blackadder).

One/Leone JB will always remain sounding like Sean Connery in my head ;)

This game... as I can't seem to stop saying over the last couple of days... has continually impressed me with its sheer breadth and depth of madness - it's more brilliant than I could ever have imagined from just reading the demo thread. I really can't wait to see what it does from here.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

"It is with great discomfort that I realize that you can now say "with a little MLP Rarity thrown in" and I will actually know what you're talking about - I hope you're aware of this."

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Yuuya is Stoner Yuuya????!? :D :D :D :D