Dialogue I: New Lining
Wherein I discuss why poor new lining is disproportionately more harmful than one would expect.
So I’ve played a lot of romhacks since releasing the first patch of Lady of Masks, and I’ve been paying special attention to the ways these hacks are written, not just in the macro sense, which is what usually gets talked about in this community, but on the micro-scale as well. (gosh, I should write one of these about macro- and micro-scale writing just so the language is there. I’ll do that next I think.) The way dialogue ebs and flows, the way chapters thematically flow from one to the next, the word choice used on a character by character basis. Often, romhacks are actually quite good at this micro-scale writing, such that even when the overall plotting of a story is poor, or rudimentary, it’s often a fun ride regardless due to some colourful writing along the way. I’ve yet to see a hack that’s good at plotting but not at the moment to moment writing, but it’s very easy to think of games that do this – the JRPG genre is littered with high concept, tightly thematic stories delivered by way of stilted dialogue, bizarre character motivations, and long-winded lore dump.
The most common thing I’ve seen that damages many hacks’ writing, however, is a lack of thoughtfulness as to how dialogue is paced within the confines of the FEGBA format. I sometimes have a tendency to view my writing like that of a stageplay, in the sense that I imagine for myself the pauses that would come naturally if you were to speak the dialogue aloud. There are tools to more directly pace your dialogue in FEGBA, moreso if you use the epic Tequilla text engine rework which I will shill for every day until I shrivel up and die, but one of the easiest ways to pace your dialogue is simple: Where are your A presses?
I’m gonna be focusing more on the topic of A presses, though you can just kind of take everything I say here and divide the severity of it by like five for my thoughts on where your line breaks should go lmao. It’s less important by far, but it always always pays to be thoughtful about how your dialogue is presented. However, the placement of your [A] commands is generally going to be far more destructive when done poorly, and also has far greater use when applied proactively as a pacing tool.
Every dozen or so words, your player HAS to press A. You cannot (or, I suppose, should not, but liiiike those are the same thing ^.^) write dialogue in FEGBA without being acutely aware of the impact that this has on the structure and pacing of your dialogue. These A presses punctuate your dialogue constantly, and players will almost always read the point of your A press as a pause in their head. Not necessarily consciously, mind you, but if they read this dialogue (courtesy of Janus Lady of Masks, purely because it happened to be the text box I had open last):
They’re going to read each and every A press as being the end of a sentence, bc that’s when text stops being displayed on their screen. Read this scene with that in mind, with a short pause, maybe a bit less than a second, every time there’s an A press, and see what it does to the dialogue pacing. (As an aside, this problem is exacerbated for me, because I often don’t actually give punctuation in the things I’m reading space to breathe 
) Now, read the ACTUAL dialogue, as formatted in game:
You can feel, in this, that the flow of dialogue is better. The A presses are coinciding with pauses you’re naturally making due to the punctuation, which both forces the audience to actually take in that pause and, far, far, far more importantly, prevents them from creating unintentional pauses that interrupt the flow of your dialogue. Setting up these pauses involves you being a bit creative with fitting your dialogue into the text boxes. Sometimes, you may want to do a line break earlier, even if there’s more space, because over the course of the entire line of dialogue, putting your line break one or two words earlier now will allow your future line breaks and A presses to align nicer without having any jank where your textbox is going like this:
As for using A presses proactively, we don’t have the luxury of having a lot of the more robust visual/audio storytelling tools that more contemporary or higher budget RPGs have access to. It’s difficult for us to time our cutscenes with the music; we don’t really have access to voice acting in a comprehensive sense (there are hacks with voice acting, but they are not voice acted games by any stretch of the imagination. The level to which some of these voice acted moments live on as romhack legend is a testament to how powerful the audio/visual space of your game can be as a storytelling tool); things like CGs are often prohibitively difficult to create in a high enough quality; the list goes on. Often, a strong audio/visual component can take a line that’s just kinda bleh into a key set piece within your game. Just think about how many iconic lines you can remember from a movie, TV show, or game that, if you were to just write them out, are just kind of alright. Oftentimes it’s the performance of these lines that you remember most, or the spectacle of the moment. But how do you get that out of a romhack for a GBA game?
The short answer is you don’t, really, but you can try anyway! The long answer is that it involves the way that you use what limited tools we do have to control the pace that the player reads your dialogue. You don’t have to only put your A presses in the most economical spots, you can use them as a way to space out chunks of your dialogue. A very basic example (again, not because they’re ideal examples but because I have them on hand from Lady of Masks):
By forcing an entire A press just for this one word, the emphasis is implicit even beyond that which is already has on its own. It’s the only new piece of dialogue the player gets between the second and the third A press, and so it’s bookended by two pauses and demands their full attention. The weight of that one word is then far greater than if it were delivered without the forced pause before it. This is, again, just a basic example, but this kind of application of the tools provided to you by the FEGBA text engine is necessary if you want to maximize your story’s bite. Script is just one part of the storytelling process, and proper application of that script is key to getting the most out of it.