Redguy834

PSO2 credits trimming, mainly New Genesis

Hello, I saw your recent edit to Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis/Credits. Forgot that you originally made Phantasy Star Online 2/Production credits, which I guess I very loosely was inspired by when writing those down? Mostly just how the roles were organized, usually I'd go for the creditsheader where, here, I used asterisk followed by double asterisks like on the PSO2 page.

But, I wanted to start a discussion about them, because I really don't like the approach of combining credits across versions or even languages.

Having a complete breakdown of the credits in every iteration of the game seems much more useful to me. I don't think there's much point in "condensing" them to be smaller, quicker to read, because very few people are going to read any big list of credits. Making them smaller is also less useful because it makes it less factually accurate. Just like credits that change between console, the credits change throughout the game change for a reason: the group of developers change. When you removed the base game credits for New Genesis, many many credits were completely gone.

For example, The Hellfire Vanguard didn't credit any people for Merchandise Planning.

• Merchandise Planning: Aiko Matsuda, Yosuke Okunari, Izumi Shirafune, Jun Takemura

And a lot of individual people were removed between the between the base game and THF. 5 random examples I picked out:

• Game Designers[Enemy]: Takanari Kamaguchi
• Modelling Artists[Enemy]: Park Chuiyong
• Programmers[Interface]: Norihisa Kawamoto
• Game Designers: Keisuke Tabata
• Game Designers[Sound]: Satoshi Morita

For the few people who read through it, it would be more interesting to document each episode and show how the staff changed over the game's lifespan. I know I've been looking at that a lot with, say, Jet Set Radio/Production credits or Yakuza 2/Production credits.

Adding the voice actors to the characters credited for singing, that's a tricky thing. It's definitely more helpful for readers at a glance... but you're changing the credits. I, and I know admin BlackSquirrel too, are more in favour of keeping the credits exactly as they were given, even down to typos (I like it to be that way so that we don't add to the pile of "sites that fiddle with credits to suit their own visual style and 'correctness'" and have at least 1 that's just a straight "here's the information (mostly) exactly as given, written down so you can copy it for your own needs or just come to your own conclusions". Plus, you don't need the character additions as much if there's a voice actor breakdown instead, since readers can cross-reference.

For me as a big Production credits lover, I mainly like having them around because of them populating the pages for developers, their Production histories, to see what DNA from other games make up this particular game. PSO2 New Genesis has been frustrating for me because of the technical issues that have made it so those credits DID NOT show up in their production histories. I did think for the first time yesterday that maybe changing the name from Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis/Credits to the more standard Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis/Production credits will fix the issue, but I can't test that if I'm thinking "should I undo Redguy834's edit? Not yet, we need to talk about the last edit first, see if we want to keep it that way or not".

Hope that's all understandable, I can write things very confusingly. --Nicolaas Hamman (talk) 14:41, 24 February 2024 (GMT+2)