Most spoken dialogue on screen scrolls by at a fairly rapid pace. If it scrolls too slowly, it can make bypassing long conversations very annoying. If it scrolls too quick, you may miss important information. Most games nowadays let you control the scroll rate by tapping the action button to clear the screen, and/or setting scroll speed in the options window.
May be combined with Voice Grunting. Not to be confused with Opening Scroll, which is kind of the same thing, only for movies and TV.
Examples:
- ANNO: Mutationem: All dialogue conversations that occur in text boxes scrolls by at a fairly rapid pace.
- Breath of Fire III suffered considerably from slow scrolling.
- Ace Attorney:
- Wendy Oldbag from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney would often go on long, rambling, bitter rants about her life, or just nothing in particular. These would scroll automatically at a very quick rate, giving the player the same confused, bewildered state of mind trying to read it as the other characters would have listening to it.
- In Justice For All, Richard Wellington from case 1 and Moe the Clown from case 3 would also ramble randomly at times, with very fast Scrolling Text. And for added fun, Wendy Oldbag shows up as a witness again in case 4 of Justice For All.
- In addition, the speed of the text is used to indicate how fast someone is talking. This is most noticeable when a character is nervous - their text speeds up.
- And when Phoenix or Apollo present a theory they're not entirely sure about, their text slows to a crawl.
- In Trials and Tribulations, Furio Tigre's roars can last several textboxes, with the text scrolls in the same manner as the other cases stated above.
- Xenogears, already a dialogue heavy game, was made far worse by the slow scrolling textplosion of the second disc. GameShark codes just to accelerate the text became popular.
- One recruitable character in Suikoden V required the player to listen through his ridiculously long, slow-scrolling (literally one letter at a time) spiel without once pressing the button to skip through it in order to recruit him.
- The gardener in Super Mario RPG is another Motor Mouth video game character who tends to speak in rapidly scrolling text, which causes Mario to Face Fault.
- Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy Tactics:
- It is infamous for certain cutscenes with unbelievably slow scroll rates. Repeat after me: l.i.t.t.l.e. m.o.n.e.y. It's a programming error
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The NA version definitely misplaces control codes relative to the JP version. The control code "E2 XX" controls the delay before the next character – but it’s generally used for only a single character at the end of a line, and immediately reset to standard ("E2 05") right after. The comma before "little money" is missing the standard delay reset afterward and seems to be processing an end-of-line pause after each character, which is only reset when the next end-of-line sets it back. It’s a lot like forgetting to close an HTML tag!- For comparison, in FFT: War of the Lions for the PSP, the text is sped up dramatically, so that the previous interminable scenes are completed in a fraction of the time. Ironically, the game's load times swelled to the point that this didn't reduce the play time.
- It is infamous for certain cutscenes with unbelievably slow scroll rates. Repeat after me: l.i.t.t.l.e. m.o.n.e.y. It's a programming error
- Final Fantasy X-2 has one character who rambles on endlessly with very slow-scrolling text ... and who gets offended and shuts up immediately if you press a single button on the controller during a VERY long speech. (He's so offended that he won't talk to you again until New Game Plus.) One of the requirements for 100% Completion is to listen to him the whole way through.
- Final Fantasy Tactics:
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had particularly slow text scroll, coming up one letter at a time. There was no real way to speed it up; sometimes you could get a section of it to be skipped over entirely (and completely miss what's said) by spamming the "A" button, but usually only if you had already spoken to the person in question, and sometimes there was no way at all. The text scrolls much quicker in the 3DS remake, making long monologues much quicker to get through.
- An oft-repeated criticism of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was the complete lack of text-skipping ability. There was no way to make the text display to the end of the line sooner and holding the B button made the text show up only barely faster, almost to placebo levels.
- This is the entire point of Mr. Resetti from Animal Crossing. Basically, it's possible to prevent the game from remembering certain events by simply resetting it without saving. However, the game still remembers that it was reset in the first place, and as punishment the next time you start the game Mr. Resetti (a mole) will pop out of the ground and rant angrily about how you cheated. Particularly annoying if you should turn off the game and simply forget to save. Even more annoying when he shows up as an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where he does the exact same thing, obscuring a good chunk of the screen with his pointless rambling.
- In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the rant literally takes five minutes.
- Earthbound: There are two points in the game where either a Mr. Saturn or a Tenda tribesman will ask you to have coffee with them. If you say yes, the game treats you to a slow scrolling paean to how far the party has come so far and what remains unfinished. This seems to be caused by the font that was used during these scenes causing slowdown. The text crawl is far quicker in the Japanese version, with the coffee scene in Saturn Valley finishing about a minute and a half before the English version does.
- In Dragon Quest VIII, most of the text can be sped up by pressing Triangle to skip the scrolling. However, if you're talking to an innkeeper (to rest, obviously) or a priest (to save your game), you can't skip a single letter of it, except when loading your game. This makes it take nearly twice as long as it should to rest at an inn or save your progress. You also can't skip King Trode's text when doing anything with the Alchemy Pot.
- In Cave Story, the text scrolls slightly faster if you lose a life and have to go through an Unskippable Cutscene a second (or third, or twentieth) time.
- Tales of Monkey Island: This is the first time we actually see scrolling subtitle text that accompanies the voices in a Monkey Island game, be it fast or slow. Sometimes words in the subtitle text start appearing before a character says them almost at the exact same time the subtitle finishes, which is apparent in some scenes in Chapter 4.
- In Undertale, the usual scrolling text often gets slowed down or monospaced for emphasis. There's also a NPC that complains about everyone pressing the button to skip through what he says and reacts to the player doing just that.
- Water Womb World uses its text speed for narrative effect, with the protagonist's text speed gradually slowing to a crawl as they become more lethargic and are assimilated into the "divine" towards the end of the game.
