Genshin Impact Voice-Overs
I have a big obsession with Genshin Impact. I love how the characters have segments of voice-overs where you can see what the characters think about others within the game.
I have an affinity to the character Zhongli and thought it might be a fun idea to write a voice-over scenario for him as well as some other characters that I liked.
For context, these are examples of what these kind of voice-overs look like (example is Jean, a character I didn't use for the examples in my essay):
To help me get a hang of the writing, I started by writing out different ideas for what the characters could say.
For context I only used the character Barbra and Zhongli as the ones talking about other characters. For Barbra, I wanted her to talk about her sister, Jean, as in-game they are sisters, but they don't like divulging it for some reason. I liked the idea of showing this caring sister side more (as they both care about each other a lot). I liked the idea of it being an unlockable segment so I spent a while thinking through what she could say.
For Zhongli, I wanted him to talk about the character Baizhu- a doctor that has only been mentioned and seen a few times, but is not currently a playable character. There is a lot of in-game references that would make sense if you play the game, so it might not make a lot of sense to someone who hasn't played it.
Regardless, these are all the notes I took:
After all of this, it was time to choose the pieces I wanted to possibly put into a format that looks like they belong in the game.
Zhongli:
1) About Baizhu: BuBu Pharmacy: The prosperity of medicine within Liyue has been pioneered thanks to the doctor at BuBu Pharmacy. I fondly remember the day the pharmacy first opened, Baizhu was some-what a nervous and shy man. Today he is regarded to be one of the most trusted men in Liyue Harbour when it comes to herbal remedies and unknown symptoms.
2) About Baizhu: Eternal Life: Though we have only interacted a handful of times, Doctor Baizhu never fails to intrigue me. After an interesting encounter between his apprentice Qiqi and the Director, I've been hearing more hearsay about his obsession to obtain life eternal. With his bountiful knowledge of medicine, I wonder if he shall be the first mortal to obtain the lifespan of a god.
Barbara:
Jean has always been so supportive of me, especially when I started out as an Idol. She would always come to my rehearsals and performances- even when she was really busy. *Giggle* She really is the best big sister.
As you can see, I had two for Zhongli. I wasn't sure if I should do both or one of them, so I went to discord and asked my friend who plays Genshin Impact which one she liked more.
Knowing she thought it sounded like him more (as she went on to say that Zhongli has a very formal way of speaking and I captured that), I decided to stick with just doing the second text. I then wanted to put it into the format of a screen-cap to make it feel more official.
Now, as there isn't a blank format out there, I had to upload the image into CLIP STUDIO PAINT (CSP) on my iPad, where I would colour pick behind the text and then airbrush over it before duplicating the layer and blending it together with the blend tool. Here is an example of the Zhongli piece before and after:
Before:
After:
I was actually really proud of how the blending went. You can hardly tell that there was ever text on the image where it used to be. Though it took me around half an hour to meticulously get through it and blend it out, I am very happy that I did this as now I have a template for if I want to do it in the future.
After exporting it as a PNG, I then opened it on my PC in Photoshop and this was where I then got the font that they use in Genshin (Bonobo) and wrote out the text that I wanted and it turned out like this:
Now, I was really proud of this. I felt like it was something Zhongli would say about Baizhu and when I sent the screenshot to my friend they thought it looked like it could really exist in the game as a whole:
Feeling invigorated by the fact that they said it looked like it was a real in-game voice-line, I decided to get right onto doing the Barbra one. I will also post the before and after and then give an overview on what I liked and disliked.
Before:
After:
I also added in my other friend's response as I was glad that they also thought it was true to the characters!
This one was a bit harder to blend for some reason, as I think the blue being darker meant I had to be more careful with trying not to go over the finer light sections too intensely and overall was glad that the text would hide it quite a lot.
Overall, out of the two, I felt a lot prouder of the Zhongli text than the Barbra ones. I tried writing for both characters as they have very different personalities, but I think since I really liked Zhongli, I think the writing came a bit more naturally in his case.
I was a bit annoyed after I had made the screen-caps that I didn't think to run the text through a program like Grammarly, as I feel like I may've finished an apostrophe or just the general formatting as a whole, as I worry that it might break you out of the illusion of thinking that it is real.
Lastly, I actually ended up doing a final character after my friend suggested it as a joke:
Before:
After:
Seeing my friend's response was quite funny. For context, the character Venti has an affinity for wine and it is lead to believe he hides a lot of his emotions behind alcohol (he is hundreds of years old even though he looks quite young). I decided to play into the idea of him opening up to the main character (who is universally called Traveller), so I decided to go down a slightly sadder route.
With this one, I didn't think too much about the text as I know this character a lot like Zhongli, so again, the writing came quite naturally to me.
Overall, I was proud of this one too as the background was a bit hard with that streak around the text, but it turned out well too, I just have the qualm about the writing in terms of a grammatical sense.
All in all, it was really fun to do as a little exercise when it came to trying out the 'bark' method that Hannah Nicklin talked about in the industry talk (I also talk about what 'barks' are in my Essay). It was also amazing to get my friends to respond to my works and give feedback and praise as I was able to succeed on making them look like real, in-game screen-caps.
I would definitely love to do this again as I think it is a very good exercise when it comes to getting used to writing for other characters (especially if I want to do this in industry).