-Eightball... Alucard! Yo' damn right...

Completely off topic, but could somebody explain what's so disturbing about the Betty Doinxalot picture? I don't get it.

Let's see now, topic... oh yes, voice acting. Did you know that most Japanese voice acting is little better than the US counterpart? My friends and I find most voice acting stilted and annoying at best, and unbearable at worst. Occasionally, there will be a good game that has decent voice acting, but those are few and far between. Granted, there are times when the Japanese version is good, and the American version is terrible, but more often than not, both versions are pretty bad.

As for whether or not the overall quality of voice acting will continue to increase? Probably. As consumers have more exposure to decent voice acting, bad voice acting will become less and less tolerable. As voice becomes more integral to the gaming experience, game companies can afford less and less to allow shoddy acting to go through. The same thing is happening with translations, graphics, and gameplay, etc. Then again, how does one explain Army Men? Somethings are better left unknown...

- Drakonian

BTW: If they screw up FFX's voice acting, I'll never forgive Square.

Yes, that must be the next thing to smash into the gaming industry after 128-bit graphics. However, I fail to see the promise if they are going to stuff the games with many useless famous voices like an over-touted Disney movie (imagines Lulu with Julia Roberts as the voice). Oh, Lord, please forgive these sinners . . .

Which brings me to an effort that could have been better, Xenogears. Doesn't one love it when you get to see five seconds of moving lips after talking. That and Orphen (which I had rented) and it isn't the best either. This lead me to a conclusion, don't dare translate, lest ye be plagued by a Bruce Willis Auron or a voice cast as diverse as Ranma 1/2's opening song.

- Andy Newer, What happen?

On a side note, I'm pretty fanatic about good voice acting myself. Fanatic enough to realize that the voice for Liquid Snake (MGS), Ryudo (Grandia 2), and Kaneda (Akira), is Cameron Clarke, the same guy who did the voice for Leonardo on the Ninja Turtles back when we were kids. Hopefully, Square got actors of his calibur.

Jonezy63

Until yesterday's column, I had had no idea that they were out there. Hundreds upon thousands of decrepit, dank ET cartridges.

But now...now I notice certain things. The stench of creosote in the state seems to mask the smell of slowly decomposing plastic and electronics. I see little signs of the game everywhere - discarded Reeses Pieces, small diamond-shaped pits dotting the landscape, unwary pedestrians who find themselves levitating by craning their necks too far up. It even explains the men who wander around in white and brown coats, grabbing people and dragging them back to random buildings, then leaving them to find their way back out; all for no reason at all. All trademarks of the most inhumanly banal game ever made for the Atari.

The entire state is tainted - infected by the hoards of decaying copies of one terrible game. They are enraged at their callous disposal, and we, the citizens of New Mexico, have become the victims of their vengeance.

God help us all.

-Professional Generic Guy

I don't know how many people actually own the damned thing, but I remember back during the summer, when I had a job at *cough*Wal-Mart*cough*, I saw the soundtrack for Final Fantasy: TSW, and bought it the day it came out. Yes. I know. Crazy. Not the point though.

Now, on this little semi-precious stone of a CD, there was a lovely little Quicktime movie for those who bothered to pop it into their computer. This movie, undoubtably, was probably the most valuable item on the entire soundtrack (since the only really good, non-dry-and-monotonous songs on the CD were the ones NOT done by Elliot Goldenthal, composer): a preview movie for Final Fantasy X. Now, this in and of itself is cool, but certainly not spectacular. But one aspect really grabbed me, and I had to do a double-take to be sure: the voice acting. The thing had a voice-over by an American narrator, speaking English, but the character voices were another matter entirely. That would be because they were the original. Japanese. Voices.

I heard this, and a tear came to my eye. "Square," I pontificated, "is giving us the original Japanese voices in the localization. I can't believe it. It's too good to be true."

Damn Skippy.

A few weeks or so later comes the crushing news: dub. FFX is receiving the oh-so-painful treatment given to products with Japanese audio, dubbing. That is, the original soundtrack is removed and replaced by American voice "actors." I put the word "actors" in little quote-things because I probably couldn't use it more loosely. Very little effort is put into the actual acting; the majority of the effort, it would appear, goes into matching the previously-in-sync lip movements with the English script. This results in some rather hokey, un-emotive speech. Certainly the rare gem shows through occasionally, Gundam Wing and Evangelion being the only examples I can think of at the moment. Lunar had the luxury of decent voice acting, largely because much of it was in-game and didn't have lips to be matched to.

Then, of course, there are the titles with voice acting that have neither emotion or sync. The voice acting is horrible, and doesn't even try to loosely match the mouth movements of the characters. That would be, um...Legend of Dragoon, and...uh...Legend of Dragoon. Really. I haven't seen a dubbing job that piss-poor since the old Godzilla movies. Hell, at least those were half-decent, in their own quirky way. From Rose's "No, it cannot beeeeeee!" to the final FMV where Zeig's seven distinct lip movements all went towards pronouncing the word "Yes," I think LoD basically accounts for everything that can possibly go wrong with dubs, ever.

So, FFX being dubbed...I suppose there's a slight chance of me liking it, if the dubbing is absolutely excellent, perfectly matched, and brilliantly acted. If it turns out like the job on LoD, I will probably have to use the game disc to slit the throats of every last employee of Square EA. In any case, I'd rather have the original voice track included on the disk, with the option of changing voice tracks. It is said, however, that the game is likely to fill the entire disk, and that two voice tracks are unlikely. Fine then, release two versions: one dubbed, one subbed. No, it's not practical, and no, the latter probably won't sell very well, but I don't care. I'm not being practical, I'm being demanding. You know, because I'm a demanding person. They do it with anime, it's time to do it with video games. So nyeh.

--

- An'Desha, wishing everyone would just learn Japanese so nobody would have to make crappy dubs anymore.

I was going to question that idea that voice acting could be inherently good or bad, but then I realized something: I like silent text. I really do. Games like the FF series have been that way for almost fifteen years, we grew up with it, and some of us like it that way. Text-based dialogue makes a game a little more book-like rather than movie-like, and I'd miss that if all my characters started getting pre-assigned voices rather than what I come up with as I read.

I'm not even worried about voice-acting "ruining" a good script - a bad translation can do that as easily as bad acting. I'm sure the acting will generally improve as voice gets more popular, the same as text translation has. But I'm like a 2D-graphics purist - I don't object to the existance of voice in games (it's here to stay), and I'll even concede that it may help the "feel" of certain titles, but I'm really hoping there'll always be a market for a few quiet games.

-Toma Levine

I've always thought that a game company would do better to put in dialog, but leave it in Japanese with subtitles. I've always thought that Japanese just SOUNDS cool. Besides, if the choice comes down to bad English voice acting or Japanese voice acting where you can't really tell if it's bad, most people would take the Japanese.

Of course, then you've got Japanese games (American games don't count because they're meant to be in English) with such badass English voice acting that cutting it would be a travesty. Like Grandia 2 and MGS.

I almost forgot to mention that the guy who compared Rei to the Xbox deserves a strict lashing. VERY STRICT.

-Rune, torn between five languages