Voice acting. Full or partial

[beastcarving]

I've started adding some voice acting to my game. I personally like partial voice acting, rather than full. I like to read my VNs, not listen. Thoughts?

[Autumnotopia]

Similarly, I've been debating recently about the difference between 'voice acted' and 'narrated'. One of the main characters in my current project is blind, so I've been thinking a lot about accessibility. I know Ren'py has an easy way for readers to automatically have the screen reader read it (which I didn't know about before and is super cool), but I was wondering if it would be worth the effort to just record a spoken word read-through of it on my own to ensure correct pronunciation and in general a nicer flow. It kind of feels like I'm basically planning an audiobook haha, which is different from how I've conceptualized games in the past.

So basically I think this is also an interesting question from an accessibility viewpoint. In general I also prefer partial voice acting, but now I'm just like 'wait, does that play well with screen readers?'

[beastcarving]

Agreed. However, I do use the Ren'py narrator for editing sometimes. I added partial voice acting to my current project just so the readers/players can get a good example of their voices as they play.

[Jin]

I always personally preferred partially voiced VNs for the same reason. Less is more. But it's definitely interesting to consider it from a accessibility point of view. I think that would require a more neutral reading, like audiobooks? I'm not sure.

[Awiola]

I've always preferred full voice acting [especially in japanese games but since I'm not english natice it's usually nice to hear how they pronounce all these weird words; also sometimes I'm laughing inside hearing non natives in games trying to say something in another language and it's so bad it's funny] because with partial it kind of looks like half-assed work. The more if it's done like in Ozmafia [seems like they didn't have big enough gudget to get it done properly and voice acting is just cut in some scenes to suddenly appear in the next, like wth].
The bad thing about full voice acting is the fact they talk so slowly, sometimes it drives you mad or simply make you skim through their lines. On the other hand it could make the game a whole lot better. There was this one Shakespeare inspired game when the whole narration and dialogue was done by one person and he sounded just great when he impersonated some characters.
Though I guess most people prefer partial not only for financial reasons...

[Zelan]

I personally can't stand partial voice acting. I have trouble reading if I'm trying to listen to sound at the same time, so unless the voice acting matches up exactly with the written dialogue, it's getting turned off.

[Funes]

I've never read a VN with partial voice acting but I played games that have this function. In a game, that won't be a problem, because the dialogues will be kind of short compared to actual gameplay, but in the case of a VN where you need to read all the time, having to listen to the same phrases again and again... I think it'll be kind of annoying. Still, I'm talking without experience.

[beastcarving]

I ask because I have used partial voice acting in my demo "Your Brother's Religion" and I wanted to know what was more popular regardless of what I like personally.