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]

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.