Class 5

[davidn]

Class five! It's another hour-long one and I usually try to space these out a bit over days, but people had been waiting for this one - and I don't think they'll be disappointed!

This is an amazing chapter - a climactic part of the game with great performances from absolutely everyone. It's very illustrative of the game's ability to toss its players around like they're in an emotional tumble dryer - we go on a very long journey through here, from absolutely laughing our heads off during much of the first part to fear and anguish in the third.

This is the genius of this game. The immediate draw of its bird-related craziness honestly pales in comparison to the lunacy that it lets you into once you break the surface, and you keep on exploring deeper and deeper until you're this far into a storyline that you would never have thought it had. Anyone who's just heard about the game in passing may accuse us of overacting here, but... honestly, I don't think that much of this was actually acting by the end!

5-1: Sakuya and Shuu

0:25 Dad/Mum
0:45 Baby Sakuya
2:35 Doctor...
3:00 Assessment of Sakuya
4:55 Cleaver
6:40 Lack of fingers
7:15 Save point
9:10 Mmmmmmmegalomania
10:55 Distraction
11:55 Delayed reaction
12:35 Corpsing the doctor
15:25 Fate
16:25 Listening to Shuu
17:20 Massive thing
18:35 Drawers and hesitation
20:40 Literacy

5-2: Preparation

0:55 Take a drink
3:40 Physical labour
4:35 Take a look at him
6:45 Nobility knows no illness!
8:10 A Yuuya scene, do I even need to say anything more specific about these by this point?
10:05 Pause for thought
12:05 Dodge the scarecrow!
16:15 Plan

5-3: Brothers

0:00 Oh, the whole blasted thing.

Well done.

Comments

[xaq.livejournal.com]

After watching the first two parts, you get the sneaking suspicion that Nazerine has a thing for blatant innuendo...

[kjorteo]

Well, I mean, consider the source.... (Side note: casting Raven as Yuuya is the single greatest thing this group has ever done.)

[xaq.livejournal.com]

I would say it's a tie between Raven/Yuuya, Raven/Anghel, David/Murderbeaks, and you/Pidgeworth...honestly, as far as picking who voices coo, I'd say we made the best choices possible.

[kjorteo]

Well, I did get through my own Hato stream and notice that I only had clear distinct voices for one or two characters, and thought "hey, maybe if I get a group together, and I can do the characters I can actually do and people who are actually better at Yuuya/Kazuaki/etc. can cover my weaknesses there, we might just get a solid cast out of this whole idea." It just so happens that the end result worked out even better than I had dreamed.

Actually, the sheer level of serendipity in a lot of the casting is almost mind-blowing to think about ... I was originally thinking David for Anghel, for example, but he sort of fell to Raven instead because everyone else already had two characters each by the time that decision came up. Raven's subsequent performance has made me extremely grateful that it worked out that way, to say the least.

Even better: The reason David was already full on characters by the time Anghel came around was because he got Kazuaki and Murderbeaks, whom Raven basically insisted on (just like how the entire rest of the group decided I had to be Sakuya, I guess) because David had come up with those voices earlier ... when he couldn't make one of my original Hato stream sessions, and I had the idea of making him do his own blind playthrough stream of that same part to catch up. If he hadn't missed mine, or had just opted to watch the recap video instead....

Basically my point is we had just about the luckiest casting imaginable. I think my Sakuya and Kaye's Hiyoko were literally the only characters we already cast in the inception phase (and we also added you as Okosan by the time the first recording started,) and absolutely everything else just sort of came together along the way.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Well, I definitely won't argue with how it worked out.

I will, however, take this moment to admit to a bit of a quirk of mine: I can never hear/read the word "serendipity" without thinking of this (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v307/WillRennar/serendipity.gif).

[kjorteo]

 

[xaq.livejournal.com]

It's a character, and eponymous mascot, from a series of kid's books (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity_(book_series)) I read back in elementary school that I still hold fond memories of.

Granted, my initial interest in the book was due to the fact that she looked like a plesiosaur, and I was a bit of a dinosaur geek back then...*shrug*

[kjorteo]

How cute! I kind of want to read those, now.

[davidn]

I think that everyone knew exactly who was voicing Sakuya from the very start ;) During my catching-up session, I tried to come up with some sort of voice for absolutely everyone, with some having a great deal more success than others (your Sakuya voice, for example, stands out much more than mine because your voice is actually appreciably different when reading his lines) - apparently Kazuaki and Shuu were the ones that stuck in people's minds, and I'm very glad for it! I think during that first part I invited Ravenworks to make the decision on Kazuaki, and he gave him to me... but I did definitely want to be Shuu :)

I honestly can't think of a better way to have cast anyone, either - the chirpy, slightly unhinged narration of Budgiebin (which we unfortunately haven't had enough of in this route!), the boisterous Okosan and melancholy Ryouta, the saucy Yuuya and enthusiastic Anghel, the classic Nageki and especially Sakuya voices... and how much I'm loving having a comic and villain part. Something would seem missing without any one of them.

So many comments praising each other like this might turn it into a hugfest, but... God knows we all need it, after this!

[kjorteo]

I'm all right with this turning into a hugfest! You people all put on such phenomenal performances (everything we've seen up to this point, of course, and since we're actually farther ahead than what you've posted, I can mention that Xaq also completely brings down the house in early class 7) that you truly deserve it.

I keep surprising myself with the extent to which Hatoful is never truly over--I already hundred-percented this game (or so I thought) back when I did my own stream, before this group even assembled, and I just wanted a run-through of Anghel's route as a recording equipment and group chemistry test before HolidayStar came out. After that, then it went so well that I just had to see how we did BBL. After that, now I kind of want to do a Ryouta or Nageki route run-through just to give BudgieBin the kind of dramatic tear-jerking performance everyone else has enjoyed (or will enjoy) in BBL. And then, of course, there's HolidayStar....

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Well, at that point I felt like I had to do something to stay on par after the end of class 5...and to cleanse my mind of all the innuendo. Especially that line at part 1's 18:35 mark. (I had a powerful urge to just say "NO, I AM NOT READING THAT.")

[kjorteo]

I did notice it took you a bit to work up the nerve to read it! But it was hilarious, and then, on the other end of the spectrum, I think that your early chapter 7 performance more than matched my contribution to chapter 5. So it worked out rather nicely, I think!

[davidn]

I have to wonder if we would have been having exactly the same conversation about how perfect and impossible to improve the casting was if any decisions had gone another way :) They were mostly very spur-of-the-moment, but they worked out fantastically and it's hard to imagine the game without any one of these voices at this point.

[davidn]

Yes, I have to wonder whether that was an invention of Nazerine, or if it was there in the original Japanese... it just keeps on escalating throughout that scene, even through the description of him being knocked out from behind!

[kjorteo]

With Sakuya, I'm not sure there's ever any kind of acting except "over."

Everyone else in this chapter was absolutely phenomenal, but special praise goes to your Shuu for crossing the line from creepy into downright terrifying with far too much ease, and of course Raven's Yuuya for the same kind of "wait a minute, suddenly this silliness is downright heartwrenching" performance that the game itself puts on at that point. He rose to the occasion of that scene beautifully, he really did. Xaq also had some real palpable anger in Ryouta's confrontation at the end of 5-3, and Kaye handled being Sakuya's father much better than I handled being Sakuya at that age. (I would like to congratulate everyone involved in that part for making me push my already-questionable fake British accent all the way into full-blown Luke from Professor Layton.)

Hatoful is ... it's a game wherein you are the only human in a school for pigeons, and you date pigeons represented by actual Google and/or self-taken photos of pigeons. Then, if you can accept that, it gets weird.

We jokingly use that line a lot, but this is one of the most definitive moments in which the trap is sprung--the end of 5-3 is definitely one of those "I remember when this game was about dating pigeons...." moments.

[premchaia_pre4]

You realize I still went o.@ a bit at “Never let anyone tie you down”.

[kjorteo]

There were an astonishing number of Yuuya lines I could have taken the wrong way (and would have, in a more lighthearted scene) but chose to maintain respectful silence instead. Actually, this entire group has an incredible sense of appropriateness for when to be playful or serious, for a game that so gleefully whiplashes between the two--for example, just look at the times when we read typos in the script as they are written to poke fun at them, and when we just say what the line meant and refrain from further comment.

[premchaia_pre4]

Fair enough! And the plushie icon works very well for such things.

[davidn]

I'm honestly not sure how to feel about my new-found capacity for unspeakable evil! I'm not sure how much of it is just the British stereotype here, but... I've found I do get a lot of enjoyment from provoking that reaction (except at that moment in class 7 when it all became too much).

Raven's transformation was amazing :) Hearing the same voice we knew as a non-serious character, along with your own well-practiced pained version of Sakuya, suddenly going through this tragic plot point that could only have worked with birds as the characters... and at the very other end of the scale, your squeaky-voiced Sakuya was one of the funniest things in the entire run so far (I had to turn the volume of my laugh down significantly in the edit because it had distorted so much!)

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Satisfy my paranoia... how much did you edit stalling, 'uhhh's and mumbling out of the middle of lines...? I caught one point where you trimmed out the bit where we were confused who was speaking in a flashback but... there was also a line where Ryouta is telling Shuu to stop running away, and I was like "well you'd think the farther he could get from them the better", and I was just remarking how in my head it felt like I dragged the whole conversation to a screeching halt while I searched for my words, but in the playback it wasn't so bad... but then that reassurance was thrown into question when I realised that might just be the edited version :P (I'm also pretty sure the flubbed line in Yuuya's big death speech was more of a train wreck than it sounded in this video...)

[davidn]

I really do very little editing beyond cutting the chapters up into digestible parts (er, much like one of my characters) and noting down the parts that I think particularly stand out. I'll cut a section of confusion out if it causes a significant length of time dawdling without being funny in its own way (and over the course of the game I've removed several completely blank pauses when people were waiting a few seconds for the Hangouts screen to update), but my micro-managing edits tend to be limited to just suppressing any microphone blows/scrapes, or shifting my speech a little if I accidentally talk over someone.

Usually, large edits will be obvious because the music will shift (I'm working with everyone's speech on the same channel as the game sound). To the best of my memory, I didn't edit anything at all in either case you mentioned - that was how you said them in the original!

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"To the best of my memory, I didn't edit anything at all in either case you mentioned - that was how you said them in the original!"

That is terrifically reassuring to hear :) Well... slightly worrying to discover that reality is so different from how I experience it... but reassuring to find out that it's different for the better, at least ;)

"I really do very little editing beyond cutting the chapters up into digestible parts (er, much like one of my characters)"

Aaaaaaand there goes all my newfound comfort ;P

[davidn]

I just checked - there are no cuts anywhere near the "run away" part, and there is one cut before a Yuuya line but I'm pretty sure that it was just to remove a gap, not to cover up a stutter - and it was well before the death speech.

I don't think I know anybody who's... confident in their voice, in recording it or hearing it played back to them. It's actually through this - and the other videos that I did back when my Youtube account had other games on it - that I've received the greatest boost in confidence in that department. I hope that this happens to you as well :)

[kjorteo]

I've actually always been envious of people who have "sharper" voices, like Raven and Xaq, as opposed to the fuzzy Big Bird thing I've got going on. However, it's surprising just how much better one can feel in the interim just by getting a new microphone that doesn't make everything horrible the way the last one did.

[davidn]

Describing a voice beyond accent is difficult, but... from when I first heard it, I thought that one of the things that was distinctive about your voice was that you talked very precisely, with each word being very distinctly sounded - a property that I also noticed on the people from the Albuquerque transport authority when I accidentally contacted them last year.

I find that people have difficulty understanding me and often have to get me to repeat things (it's been mentioned that I speak very quickly, and it takes conscious effort for me to slow down) - and I can sometimes feel myself sounding less distinct than I would like. But that doesn't seem to be a problem with the Shuu voice. Maybe I should just talk like that all the time

[kjorteo]

Do it at work! "As you can see, the UI for this program has been mmmmmmuch improved. Hohohoho."

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I was actually a bit concerned about this from the get-go due to how conversations tend to go for me in real life...apparently I don't speak very loudly in real life, so I was kinda worried you guys would have trouble hearing me.

[kjorteo]

Microphones can do a lot to level that sort of thing out. I mean, my other character is Nageki, and he seems to pick up relatively well. (If anyone was actually curious, I achieve his distinctive subdued-yet-audible voice through basically the audio equivalent of the Vertigo Effect. I have a desktop stand type microphone, I yell out Sakuya's lines at normal 18" or so distance from it, and for Nageki I speak barely above a whisper but compensate by getting so close that I accidentally hit my glasses against the pop filter in the middle of his flashback last time and I'm just hoping it didn't pick that up....)