Double Agent
Take A Look At This! - October 18, 2001 - Brooke Bolander

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. I'm sorry - I'm not used to escorting men. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Voice-acting in games - for the most part, it sucks. Granted, Ghaleon sounded pretty damn cool, and I'm not about to go tell Solid Snake he sounds like a wuss, but the majority outweighs the minority. Boo hoo.

Lenneth Valkyrie sounded cool, dammit. And that's all I have to say 'bout that.

Chicka-bow-wow.
Hey, don't make fun of Alucard. His voice is awesome. So what if his dialogue was written by a Japanese fourth grader taking English One and his inflection is equivalent to a junior high acting student's? He's got the whole Barry White low 'n mellow thing going on.

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

Well, it might have worked if he wasn't supposed to be a thin white vampire. Bishonens don't typically sound like black private dicks, know what I'm sayin'? And, um, the voice still sucked. Sorry.

Things never change.
Brooke,

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.

What was so disturbing about that picture? Well, let's see. It was a half-Tonberry, half-human. It was wearing a dress far, far too short for comfort...Oh, and did I mention it had freaking breasts? Yeah.

Oh, and there is decent voice-acting out there for games, such as Metal Gear Solid and, to a lesser extent, Valkyrie Profile - I just don't see things getting any better, for some odd reason. Maybe it's because I'm jaded and see the quality of most things pushed aside in favour of cheapness. Why try and do something right when you can do it for less?

If getting better-quality products was simply a matter of "Look, ICO is better than Army Men! We demand you make more games like this!" then we wouldn't have the influx of sucktacular games we do now. Things sadly just don't work that way.

*Giggle*
Madame Bolander,

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?

Bart's voice-acting made me cry. Okay, so all the voice-acting in Xenogears made me cry, but Bart's especially. "JERK!" he screamed, and I fell to the floor, unable to stop simultaneously laughing and crying. I think they eventually gave me a sedative, but it's all a bit of an indistinct blur after that first hillariously inarticulate shout.

Let's all say a silent prayer that Xenosaga doesn't end up the same way.

"Oooooh, it's that guy!"
Regarding voice acting in games, I'm very optimistic about FFX. I've always wondered what a Square RPG with voice acting would be like. Square may have lost a lot of money, but I think they'll fork up the dough to get some decent english voice acting. At least, I hope they do. It's tough with RPG's because there's a lot more dialog than say MGS or Soul Reaver. Grandia 2 had excellent voice acting which was only used for pivotal scenes. I believe that's a good first step, wouldn't you agree?

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

See, this just showcases a prime example of why even if they did get professional voice actors, things wouldn't mesh. I cannot play Grandia II or watch the old dub of Akira without thinking of Leonardo. I just can't. Gillian Anderson doing Moro in Princess Mononoke ended up pretty much the same way. "Hey, that wolf sounds just like Scully!"

Getting famous voice-actors or just plain actors to do dubs could somewhat deter from the original feel of a video game. Games are a form of escapism. You don't see that many pop culture refs in them (I'm studiously ignoring Working Designs translations here) so suddenly hearing the voice of "that chick from Buffy" gushing from the mouth of Random RPG Heroine could be kinda disconcerting, if you see what I mean.

Revenge of ET, Part Deux
I live in New Mexico.

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'm getting a mental image of some placid family in New Mexico suddenly getting an unwanted wake-up call as thousands upon thousands of zombie ET carts burst from the floors of their suburban home. However, it remains to be seen whether being eaten alive by the carts would be worse than actually playing them.

Of course, there are only 5 people who actually live in the Land of Enchantment, so the rest of us won't have to worry. Ha ha, enjoy your natural beauty, suckers.

"I'm famous, pay me money."
Brooke,

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.

Another strike against using "actors" for voice-overs : they DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO VOICE-ACTING, PEOPLE! I've heard a few exceptions - I think the Toy Story voices were really well-done, despite my active dislike for both Tom Hanks and Tim Allen - but hiring celebrities to do voices just because they're famous is stupid. Really stupid, considering how much those people ask to be paid. Why not just hire someone who can do the job for less, and better quality to boot?

Of course, for whatever reason people are drawn to the 'celebrity voice' thing, which is why they hire them in the first place. It makes the DA sad, but there you have it. And when you get bad dubs, think of it as a blessing - we wouldn't have half of Zany Video Game Quotes without it! The Resident Gigolo MP3 will make even the stoniest of faces break into a smile...well, okay, it should. "It's like we're having a secret meeting!!"

I Can Read!
Ey Brook-uh!

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

Yay for using your imagination! Silent text is good, very good. You can give the characters whatever voice you feel like, key moments aren't ruined by some hillariously bad voice-actor screaming "NOOOO!" or some-such (admit it, this does happen,) and it actually forces people to read. Imagine that, putting random letters from an alphabet together to form words which make up sentences. The human mind is truly a work of art.

Oh, and there should always, always be an option to turn off the voices in a game if you get tired of them. I'll give the Lunar series as an example - the first time Ronfar wittily tossed off that Gambler line it was mildly amusing, but by the 150th random battle, you were ready to kill someone. Go find Althena yourself, you stupid cow.

"Did he just say 'I am a sausage?'"
Hi Brooke,

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

And then some people don't mind the games not being translated. Which is understandable; most languages sound cooler than the one you're speaking, you know? The lure of something new. I don't mind at all as long as there are subtitles - let 'em speak in pig latin for all I care, as long as it sounds decent and I have some way of understanding what the frood is going on.

The X-Box would be comparable to Rei only if she gained 150 pounds and became a soul-sucking, cash-gobbling abomination. Does growing to over a hundred feet tall and absorbing most of humanity count?...

Closing Comments:

Well, Devil May Cry just came out today. So how the heck is it? Initial thoughts for those of you who bought it, Free Topic Friday for the rest. May the road rise to greet your feet and not your faces, my lil' droogies.

- Brooke Bolander, makes the Devil himself cry.

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