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Tales of Vesperia.  Solid RPG, but the cutscenes and writing were pretty hard to bear.

final fantasy adventure for gameboy. mildly interesting story was hampered by bloody-piss-poor dialogue.

It's much harder to list great games with good dialogue, frankly.

I tried to replay Chrono Cross recently - a game I loved as a kid - and was struck by how clumsy the dialogue was. Totally ruined my experience, but it was still above par for a JRPG. The writing in most games is dire.

Vanquish. Actually this applies to the whole story, but the dialogues were specially terrible.

I mean, really, it was as if, when they were finishing the game up, the developers noticed they had forgotten to write anything up, so they went to a bar, got really drunk, and, in the following day, based every single line on the random scribbles they had scrawled on their napkins.


Great gameplay though.

Yeah, the standards for writing is pretty damn low.  I'm doing my small part: if a game has awkward and stupid/cliched dialogue, I simply refuse to play it.

I am a bit more forgiving when it comes to bad localization, but not very.

(fact: this standard of mine has saved me a lot of money.)

Another part we can all do:  praise the games with good writing, even if they aren't super-great at it, just to prove that we actually do care.  Case in point: 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors.  Sure it's a bit silly and stupid, but it is definitely trying very hard to raise the bar and I think we can all agree that it's a nice sentiment.

999 was awesome. When I noticed the Cat's Cradle tie-in, I freaked out.  :screamy:

Let me add "Wild Arms 2" as an example of a game with the crappiest. localization. ever. Shadow Complex is pretty bad despite being written by Orson S. Card. Also, the early Breath of Fire games are just... illegible.

Half Life 2 Italian localization sounds like it was made asking random guys to read things into a microphone; they got every accent wrong, same guys have different voices at different points, translation is plainly made up, and everyone tries to mimick some Romenian/Russian accent :droop:

I was on the point of dropping it for the dubbing alone, fortunately I "found" an US version.

The first two are even worse. The dialogue in WA3's english version is just overly bland and repetitive, while in 1 and 2 it doesn't even make any sense most of the time.

Oh crap, sorry, I meant Wild Arms 1&2. Wild Arms 3 actually isn't that bad at all, and is arguably better than the later ones, but I was playing it recently so I just confused their names.  :facepalm:

i thought the story of wild arms 1 was great, one of the best jrpg stories. of course story and writing are different things; final fantasy tactics is an example of a game with a great story but poor translation.

"I hope that's not Chris' blood..."

Monster Party for the NES. Fun game, lots of levels, interesting and outlandish bosses, monsters that make you go "wtf?", but those few words in the game... :facepalm: I remember thinking as a kid "That was brutal. Aunt Betty had better have gotten me the best game to play ever."

Deceased Crab: Sorry, I'm dead.

that was part of its charm, though, and fit in with the weird atmosphere. the intro was absurdly hilarious!

Phantasy Star II. Some rather bad and obvious typos won't allow me to take the game seriously. I mean, "Allready?"

Harvest Moon (SNES) as well. Oh my, not only typos, there was even one speech that had difficulty with the text box and got printed out farther than the screen did.

Baten Kaitos.

Both games were pretty sweet, but the dialog made me cringe like I just got punched in the side by a very heavy man.

Just Cause 2 has horrible dialogue and voice acting.

I'm going to go with...every Harvest Moon.  And I say that because I played many of them.

Of course, they've gotten better over time, and nowadays things are mostly palatable if not very wooden.

On the flipside, I'd totally recommend, say, Persona 4 for fun dialog.

Dissidia. Fantastic game gameplay-wise, but the story and dialogues are just  :epileptic:.

Pretty much every Touhou game I've played has at least a few bosses with incredibly pointless dialogue, especially in the first few stages. They're not exactly painful to read, but they make one wonder if ZUN was drunk when writing the dialogue (given that it's ZUN, I wouldn't be surprised at all if he was).

House of the Dead 2. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWxw0wmeNQ)Horrible writing and the worst voice acting ever combine into a shitfest of epic proportions. So bad it's good.

I'm also seriously disappointed that no one has mentioned the infamous Jill Sandwich (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtTfptkUgj0) yet.

This (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bx_9QYt7k) is mostly a swipe at voice acting, rather than writing, but I wouldn't give dogs some of these lines to read.

I wouldn't say they're terrible at all. They're incredibly hammy, that's for sure. But the delivery is actually pretty solid and I wouldn't put it past Mikami to have made a lot of that awkwardness intentional.

Anyone played the casual hidden object game series, Mystery Case Files? Dire Grove had great acting and dialog, very believable actors, but the new one, 13th Skull, had horrible awkward acting, and the writing sucked. The people's excuses for having you search for objects as well as their awkward acting made the game so crap, it was actually funny having to watch them.

i think a related (interesting) topic might be

'games with great stories and terrible dialogue'

since a lot of games have really good plotting but really bad dialogue, usually due to poor localization (for instance, the original version of final fantasy tactics)

"Mista J.C. Denton, een da fresh."

So wonderfully, deliciously campy. If Human Revolution has well-written dialogue and believable voice acting, I will be sorely disappointed.

"Oh my god. J.C. A bomb."
"A bawhm."

Yeah, Vanquish doesn't take its story very seriously, none of Platinum's games do (with the possible exception of Infinite Space). The humor isn't as obvious as in Bayonetta and Madworld, but it's there.

See FFX. "HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA"

Starcraft 2.

Every line spoken in a terrible country accent was bad.

Every line was bad.

All voice acting was bad.

"Now how 'bout I push this BUTTON with a SKULL  on it?"

"It's time for some LIQUID REFRESHMENT!"

"Those dominion eggheads really thought of everything! *flush.*"

"Sir, the suns energy output has just jumped five hundred percent!" "SLOW DOWN, MATT! TELL ME WHAT IT MEANS!!!!"

"These STRUCTURES lack POWER... Perhaps if we built PYLONS we could USE them AGAIN."

Every line from the generic lab-nerd character.

It's all so terrible.

Tychus, a character that doesn't know how to use a simple radio, is trusted in a giant superweapon armed to the teeth with giant cannons and nuclear warheads that launch at the press of a button.

"It's an ABOMINATION. WHO could have CREATED such a thing." Senile zeratul doesn't remember finding out and confronting the guy in the previous game.

Ach.

I still can't get over the way they butchered that story. To try to turn it into firefly, ack.

Also,

NARUD IS DURAN BACKWARDS!

Terrible story and terrible dialog.

Decent multiplayer gameplay though.

Iji.

this part doesn't sound that bad -- it's just basic instructions about what to do. the rest is bad tho ya

sc1 didn't have very good dialogue either but next to sc2 it's great in retrospect -- perhaps because they kept the sub-stories very tight (they had to tell an entire self-contained chapter of a story in 10 missions, whereas sc2 is lazy and has like 30+ missions per campaign)

final fantasy tactics has great dialouge take it back.

"blame yourself. or god."

let that soak into you

You know, I've never got why people make such a huge deal out of this line. It's... a kind of goofy thing to say, and that's pretty much it. But it always gets talked up as "urrgh this is the worst line in a video game EVER! I can't believe how much it sucks hahahaha"

Deus Ex. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kihGm4KfY7k) Generally the actual writing (text) is good, and the overall story/plotting is awesome (especially how it can be impacted by the player), but the delivery and voice acting is absolutely hilarious. Watch as JC Denton reacts to a bomb. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG1qKzIsisU)

Harvest Moon to this day, is still one of my fave series & Friends of Mineral Town is one of my fave GBA games but had one of the worse translations. 

What a shame.

I'm not so concerned about bad writing in some games because game designers, who sometimes double as writers, can't be good at everything! They already have to be good at understanding people and just about everything else. I don't remember Tales of Vesperia having ridiculously bad dialogue, in fact, I've never really bothered to look into dialogue in mainstream, published games. I'm much more critical of indie games for some reason. :L

It doesn't have bad dialogue. Corny in some places, maybe, but Tales games tend to be pretty cliched.

Mass Effect's dialogue was worse, though. The over the top Renegade dialog makes up for it.

Castle Shikigami 2, at least the translated version had such horrible voice acting and "engrish" dialogue that I'm still not sure if it wasn't done on purpose for comedic effect.

It ended up being a fairly decent shmup that was made even better by the shittyness of its dialogue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r3ZWvfff-w&feature=related

Same goes for David Duchovny in XIII. His delivery of the lines is as flat as can be. Shame, since the plot's fascinatingly interesting and convoluted...

Generally its hard to write believable dialogue for games that happens in some sort of fantasy or extraordinary environment. It has always being major challenge also in literary and films. Games tend to go even much further in their extraordinary setting than other forms of entertainment. You just can't make believable dialogue out of a situation where two characters are talking about diamond plated golden sword that is supposed to kill eternal evil thats made out of lava. The problem with these games is that they tend to take everything very seriously. Its hard, very hard to achieve even for most accomplished fiction and screenplay writers. Penumbra Overture was done well, but it had no dialogue at all. Story was told quite well however.

Some genres are easier, but fantasy/scifi game genres are absolutely hardest by means of dialogue. I think this is generally more a problem in fantasy themed games, than scifi thou. More closer the extraordinary setting is to our world, more easier the dialogue construction becomes. In films e.g. Alien and The Thing. They are fantasy and scifi, but they work so well because the characters are normal people from our world. Like they are complete apart from the extraordinary setting.

How about Conan (film)? Its very fantasy and very extraordinary, it has dialogue and story. But it is not serious, It's like living, breathing statement of "being to most awesome fantasy film ever". That attitude you don't see too much in game industry. We used to have that back in days, but nowadays everything is very very serious. And dialogue sure fails because its hard, if not even impossible to make such level of believable dialogue that fits with the overall seriousness.

But you can counter-attack that by removing as much of dialogue and story telling from a game as possible, and only focus on presenting the game universe as is.

I loved Sander Cohen in Bioshock -- very memorable character -- except for that time he said "like a moth to the flame". Come on guys...

The Soldiers: Heroes of WW2/Faces of War/Men of War series.

For those who haven't played. Its a WW2 RTS, with a very detailed physics and environment damage system. Every soldier and vehicle has a inventory, and it has a building damage system that is close to many modern FPS games. And best of all it lets you directly control a single unit at a time like a RPG. One of those unknown gems of gaming in my opinion.

But the voice acting will make you cringe. Sounds like they pulled random people off the streets and gave them a few bucks to read lines.

Elder Scrolls games are pretty bad in my opinion, though they've been getting a bit better. There are games with much worse dialogue, but the problem is that most of those games are at least interesting on the grounds that their dialogue is so bad. Morrowind in particular has dialogue that is functional, but terribly dry and humorless and boring and repetitive; just one dedicated writer of reasonable skill would have made that game a lot better. That said, i still like it a lot.

How about the english versions of the Forbidden Siren series?  :wizard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=lyxNslc7qis#t=194s

OHHHHH ITS NO YOOOSE

I am going to go with a popular one and say Halo: Reach. I could not stand the voice acting in that game. :P

Resident Evil

Star fox 64

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Fantastically good gameplay, decent story for a Castlevania, but the dialogue was hilariously bad.