Mistress Hrin's Granado Espada Blog

The One About V2.6.3 Vincente Rio

Oh my... I can't believe we are just 2 weeks away from the launch of V2.6 The Requiem! Still so much to do and the premium item mall is still in a pretty messy state... But one step at a time.

Just a heads up - we won't be opening up the V2.6 Chaos Requiem maps immediately on the first day of launch, since we are planning to do a gradual content release over the next 3 months. Likely Chaos Requiem will be released in late July/early August. It's pretty tough at this point in time for the majority to tackle that map since the advised level is Lvl 118~130! It might be a good idea to continue where you last left off in regard to the training of your expert characters...

When V2.6 releases on 3 July 2008, Thursday (almost confirmed but better to be safe than sorry so i am still gonna use the term 'tentative'), we are planning to have a special Vincente Rio event: All gamers who manage to level Vincente Rio to Level 100 within a month will receive a Vincente Rio exclusive costume! Currently awaiting IMC approval for it, but it is should be good to go since they had a similar event in kGE as well.

Vincente Rio is a little closer to my heart since my buddy, Runner (GE Comic Creator), was the voice actor for Vincente. Which made my time at the sound studio particularly entertaining since I was his producer. Before we went down to the sound studio, we discussed a few ideas for the type of voice Vincente would be, especially since he is the very first bard type class in GE. Some sessions went like...

"Hey Hrin! I have this awesome idea! Vincente will form a band with Gracielo in his 2 minutes to midnight costume and they could be like Iron Maiden!"

"What?! Heavy Metal? ...next idea?"

"What's wrong with Iron Maiden?! blah blah blah"

"Ooo... you know what? Let's make him like one of those boy band types! He looks like the boy band type, don't you think?"

"BOYBAND?! NO WAY! Vincente's cooler than that! We can't subject him to a life of boyband-hood!"

And so back and forth we went thinking about the various genre of singers and what voice would be best suited for Vincente. We finally compromised on something that amused us both - a laidback Mexican singer with his guitar.

At the sound studio...

Setting Up

Producer's Console Setup

Runner's a pretty good voice actor, so it didn't take very long to do the voiceovers. There was only one word that his inner Mexican had "issues" with. That word was "Domination"

"Domination" he would say.

I burst out laughing,"That sounds Italian! Not Mexican!"

"DomiNAtion" he tries again.

"Oh hi, God father. You sound like the mafia boss now."

"DOmiNation" he makes yet another attempt.

"Are you thinking of Domino's Pizza or something? How comes you keep sounding so Italian!?"

Domination gone wrong...

Finally, we decide the change the word from Domination to "That's all that is", which was actually an NG that poor Runner spouted out in exasperation whilst sulking from his failed attempts to expel the Italian from his Domination.

After we got all the voiceover clips we needed, then came the editing of each sound clip in order to fit them into the 1-3 secs time length of the original voiceover:

Editing the soundtracks with the help of sound editors

And voila! Here's the finished product of dear ol' Vincente Rio:

Speedy Gonzales, anyone?