Little Voice -
October 19, 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. The only thing left for me is the grave, and the hungry, hungry worms! Don't say we didn't warn you.
Well, I was going to make today's column all about Devil May Cry, but you guys didn't want to talk about that. And since I fear the faceless hordes of readers so, we will continue discussing voice-acting, which appears to be one heck of a popular topic.
Ryoko's voice was the Best. Dub. Ever.
| Yes, I know them by name. Sue me. |
| Dear Brooke and/or whoever does DA on the weekend
I was just reading the latest Double Agent about the sheer suckiness of
voice acting in games but I saw a whole missing piece of the puzzle... and
I'm not talking Thousand Arms, which to it's credit had excellent voice
acting for an RPG. No, nobody bothered to touch Voice Acting on the Nintendo
64. Understandable since you were sort of hinting at 'serious RPGs' in which
the console is sorely lacking.
However.
Mario 64 gave us a talking Mario and Princess Toadstoo-er-Peach. Sure the
guy who did Mario (Charles Martinet methinks) sounded kinda high pitched, but
unless you're a purist who thinks Mario has to sound like Captain Lou
Albano, you must admit that it was kind of neat hearing the 8-pioneer grunt
in pain when hit by a Goomba or shout Italian Colloquialisms while tossing
Bowser at Bombs... or even drown, seems to me Mario had a top notch death
gurgle. Link too, seemed to receive top-notch treatment. And you were
talking about Professionals?
Clay Fighter 63 1/3 had mucho voice acting done by real pros, among them
were - Dan Castanella (sp?) the voice of Homer Simpson, Jim Cummings (If
there's a gruff voiced/raspy voiced character in a cartoon, it's prolly
him) and I dare say even Rob Paulsen (Yakko Warner and Raphael (another Ninja
turtle alumnus)). But it was a fighting game in an era where people were
getting sick of fighting games.
But more importantly, what about Star Fox 64, a great game that had various
voices throughout it? That was excellent voice acting that really seemed to
add to the game. Or Conker's Bad Fur Day, it too had good voice acting and
returned to North America a love of silly things said in a British Accent
not seen since the days of Monty Python. They were both done by Rare,
right?
Well, other than the fact that Rare and Square rhyme, they both have a die
hard fan base that looks to them for some degree of quality. While
Xenogears' scant bits of voice acting were debatable, I don't think they'll
do that to FFX. Final Fantasy has always been a series arguably handled
with the utmost care since it is Square's flagship franchise. If they botch
the North American version's voice acting and detract from the beautiful
sights of the game then many will probably see that as the last straw of
Square's '82% QUALITY, SCREW THE OTHER 18% WEGOTTAGETTHISGAMEOUTNOWGOGOGO!'
policy. However, as long as they treat it as a labour of love and don't rush
it to make deadlines, Final Fantasy X's voice acting will probably be a
highlight and a pleasant surprise. I hope.
~Ranagan Labardine
P.S. I like your letter column, it's a fun read. =)
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Yeah, but those three you mentioned are exceptional at making their voices sound different from role-to-role, which is the hallmark of a good voice-actor. Heck, Jim Cummings has done so many cartoons and various VAs that I've actually become numb to his voice. In other words, he's done so many roles that when I hear him, I don't automatically register the voice I'm hearing as Ed the Hyena - his voice has become aural wallpaper to me. In a game, this would be a very good thing.
Dan Castanella, on the other hand, is so flexible that he can sound like anything. The man does 5 or 6 different voices on the Simpsons; you'd have a hard time recognizing his voice in a game unless you were reaaaally listening for it. Once again, that's good. Rob Paulsen...I don't know. Some people just have very distinctive voices, and I've never been able to shake the whole Raphael thing with him, as with the guy who did Leonardo. Personally, I just wish there were some VAs out there who could do voices well, but didn't have such distinctive sounds. They're too good.
Welcome to the wonderful nerdish world of voice-acting fans, folks.
| "...And then the Wisdom Tree developer said..." |
| Hey,
To the guy who's terrified of the monster ET games clawing their way up from the grave to suck your life, you can rest easy. After they were buried in the landfill, people actually started going there to dig them up. To you younger guys, this would be like clawing through a mound of garbage to get a copy of of Superman for the N64. Anyway, when Atari heard about this they dug them all up, used a steamroller to pulverize them, put the remains in a hole, and sealed it with concrete.
Of course, I suppose their spirits could still haunt the land.....
I'm getting this info from The First Quarter by Steven Kent.
-Steve
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...Awww, well that's just great. How the heck am I supposed to scare the readers up until Halloween now? Rats.
Ahh well. Next time I'll tell you the tale of how Custer's Revenge was marketed to an unsuspecting public. That's pretty damn scary in itself, I'd say.
| Sean Connery could read an advertisement for Nair and make it sound cool. |
| I trust that you've all checked out that trailer for Devil May Cry. If Dante isn't the walking personification of cool, then I don't know who is. The guy's got it all: the guns, the moves, the style, as well as the looks, the chick, the red leather pants. And then I come across this scene: Dante is facing an enemy and spews out:
"Flock off, feather-face. Or you can stick around and find out the hard way."
Ouch... That line is so lame, it hurts. And this brings me to what I want to say to game developers:
Please fix your script dialogues first, then worry about voice-acting.
In all honesty, Dante's line is not that lame. And who knows, I might've quoted him wrong, since the subtitles were in Japanese and not English, and so I'm not 100% sure if I got every word right. It's probably better than most of the dialogue in other video games. But his line is being voice-acted; it's not just some text that you can skim over. So it's harder to just ignore whatever he's saying.
Voice-acting is really a two-edge sword. It makes the script stand out, for better or worse. Unfortunately, the latter has often been the case. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why some people are against voice-acting.
And who would blame them? Lame dialogues really suck, especially when you're forced to listen to them before you can continue. So I hope game developers would save their moola for script writers rather than voice-actors.
I mean, really, even if Capcom hires Sean Connery to say that line, it still won't fly.
- Paris
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Moral Of The Story - you can have red leather pants, be half-demon, use a shotgun and a sword, and still sound like a dork when you call someone a 'feather-face.' Jesus, who do they get to write these lines? I haven't even played the game yet and that line made me cringe like a whipped puppy. Spike Speigal himself couldn't pull that line off.
So I guess the first thing that needs to be worked on, even before the voice-acting, would be the scripts. "DIE MONSTER! You don't belong in this world!" isn't exactly top-notch material, let's be serious here. And yet when Lenneth Valkyrie spouts off some attack in Norse or whatever language valkyrie maidens like to use, it sounds cool. Because the lines are cool.
You still need good VAs though, don't get me wrong. Otherwise you might as well...shudder...'flock off.' But if you have the best voice-actor in the world reading the silliest-sounding script ever written, it just won't mesh. So many angles, it's like a rubix cube!
| "...With Tim Curry as the voice of a young Jesus Christ!" |
| I haven't played Devil May Cry--no PS2 has winged its way to my home yet--so free topic for me. And I thought I'd go back to this problem of celebrity voice acting.
Finally! Someone who feels the same way I do! I could not stop thinking of Scully during Princess Mononoke. I don't understand why Disney constantly feels the need to include famous people in their animation. (Toy Story was one movie where it actually worked out well.) I can see the Disney execs, sitting around their luxurious, wench-filled boardroom:
Disney exec 1: Who's a popular comedian right now?
Disney exec 2: That guy from Just Shoot Me...David Spade! Everyone likes him!
Disney exec 1: How about a smart-ass talking animal with David Spade's comedic antics?
Disney exec 3: Ooh! Ooh! How about...a LLAMA?
Disney exec 2: That's gold! Go give him a big sack of cash!
God save us all.
On the other side of the coin, even when anime isn't dubbed, the voice acting can still be bad...and English. Armitage III originally had English dialogue, by Kefier Sutherland and Elizabeth Berkeley. It was shown in Japanese theaters, in English, with Japanese subtitles. (I think there are a few other anime titles that did this, too.) Yet, even though the movie was designed for their voices, I couldn't get past the celebrity-ness of it. All I could picture was Jessie from Saved by the Bell. I tend to cringe at anything that makes me think of Jessie from Saved by the Bell.
As for the Lunar voice acting...some of the snippets in Lunar 2 annoyed me after a while, but for some reason, I could never tire of hearing Ronfar say "I'm a sucker for a good bang." Heh heh heh.
~Michiru
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The reason, as with pretty much everything in this sad, sordid world of ours, is little green pieces of paper. Yep. For some reason I can only put down to the comfort of the familiar, people are more likely to go see an animated film if half the cast is voiced by people they've seen on TV or in movies. The more people who say "Hey, that's Mel Gibson's voice coming out of a jackass! Let's go watch!" the more money is made, which makes for happy movie execs. Which is the only reason they make the films in the first place, really - artistic integrity in Hollywood is....well, it's not really there, for the most part.
Now as money-oriented as game developing/marketing is, we still haven't gotten to the point where it's as bad as movies...yet. Which is why Vyse wasn't voiced by Johnny Depp, and you almost never see commercials for video games. Or at least I don't.
I hope it never gets that bad. The voice-acting may be mundane, but at least I don't have to mentally visualize the face of the guy doing it. A fine example would be Jeremy Irons as Scar in the Lion King. Now I absolutely loved this character to death, but the way the animators worked went like this - they looked at pictures of Irons and incorporated his facial features and expressions into the character. So half the lion was what the animators originally put forward, and the rest was the actor who did his voice.
This would NOT work in a game, guys. I don't want to see some actor's facial features in Cloud, I just want to see what the artist originally thought up. I hope I'm making any sense at all here; I think I stopped about half an hour ago.
| Y'huck, whut does this button do, Cletus? |
| "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."
You had the option to turn the battle voices off in Lunar 2, you stupid, stupid, stupid, idiot! Learn to use your brain Brooke, seriously :}
|
I may be a stupid, stupid idiot, but at least I remember to sign all letters and e-mails I send out. Whoops! Sorry there nameless stranger, I only take pissy flamebait complaints from people with handles of some type.
This kind of letter makes me long for the overwrought, woman-hating, giant-paragraph rantings of Neorune. Oh, wait, no it doesn't.
| "Look out, he's got a nug!" |
| Heh, this is what I get for missing a day of news in favor of sleep. Of course a topic would come up that I'm actually *passionate* about...
Let me tell you: I'm studying film (cinematography, if you're wondering.) And, in the process, I've discovered that the ability to act convincingly is in fact shockingly rare, and even, say, the Keanu Reeves level is something to be admired and respected. (He at least has the ability to not sound like he's reading lines, which is not something you see often down here on the lower echelons of moviemaking.)
There are a number of reasons why voice acting is likely to be better in Japan than America, aside from the empirical evidence. Here are the ones I can think of off the top of my head: First, Japan pays actors less. The absolute highest pay that the top VAs get over there for doing half-hour TV shows (which is what I have numbers for) is about $800 per episode. As opposed to $800,000 for, say, a Friends cast member. Taping TV shows or OAVs is almost exclusively done with the entire cast in a single afternoon, and movies not much longer. So, top talent is affordable and available. (This is why actors like Megumi Hayashibara are so insanely prolific. I understand she actually manages to make a couple million dollars a year.) Second, the voice actors are bred to voice work; there's a realization that the disciplines of on-camera acting, stage acting, and voice acting are related, but separate. Plus, it's possible to rise to stardom through voice acting. Here in America, voice acting is not a respected and separate career path; the voice actors are usually the ones who can't get jobs in any other field. Finally, in Japan they have the obvious advantage of having the guy who wrote the damn lines there to explain what he meant, or offer a different line to try if one isn't working.
I can also offer you a couple "What's wrong with dubs" demonstrations you might want to try. First is one very conveniently provided by Working Designs in the Lunar games (and also Anime Works on the Magic Users Club DVDs): outtakes. Listen to the outtakes. Notice how, when the actors break character to make a comment, they sound like real people. When they try the line again, they don't. This is because they're "saying the lines the way they think the character would say them" (and usually imitating someone they've heard somewhere else) rather than just saying the lines; good actors have the ability to make the lines come from "inside" rather than what's written on paper - to sound like they just thought of the line.
Here's another trick. Try renting a subtitled live-action Japanese movie. You may notice that the voices of actual actors sound astonishingly like what you're used to hearing in anime (Not necessarily your ultra-squeaky silly little girl voice, or Naga the Serpent, but you get the idea - although I'm told there are Japanese girls who actually talk like that.) Anime and video game writers write for roughly normal voices! Which is completely overlooked by dubbers, who proceed to use cartoonish silly-voices. Oops.
Oh well, I've talked enough.
- Charlie Tangora
By the way, yeah, I know perfectly well that there are execrable Japanese actors. I watched all 13 episodes of Haunted Junction.
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Hey, I'm not saying acting isn't something that requires a heaping shovelful of talent, because there are some really amazing film actors out there. What I meant yesterday is that actual actors should stick to what they're good at, which is plain acting, not voice-acting. You could say they're basically the same things, but then you'd be wrong. Otherwise I doubt a lot of those VA talents we know and love would choose doing cartoon voices over making 500,000 bucks a pop for movie roles.
They're just better at doing voices than making faces, to get down to brass tacks. Go look up some of the VAs in the IMDB. Half of them have had bit roles in big-screen movies, and we've never noticed. Why didn't they just go on to bigger and better movie features? Because they're better at voices, of course. You stick to what works, if you have half a brain.
I wonder...if the training was as good over here for voice-actors, would they be as talented and prolific as they are in Japan? Hmm. Good letter too, BTW. Have a Chicken Cookie!
| It's the hair. |
| Although proud of myself for holding out for more than a couple of days,
I must now admit to having a silly anonymous internet crush on a
game-playing, well-spoken girl with *blue* *hair*.
Maybe my mom was Superman or something.
- Joel
|
Well that's certainly nothing to be ashamed of. It's even cute, in that anonymous-stalker sort of way that makes me fear for my safety. The ability to catch bullets in one's teeth is not something they teach you at DA Camp.
Running this column is like the video game Q&A equivalent of running the Kwik-E-Mart.
| Once again - 500 dollars?! |
| Devil May Cry almost made me cry...for it has made me realize that, yes, I
am *almost* a hardcore gamer...too close for comfort even.. but wait, let me
explain.
I've been watching the game's progress for awhile now, mildly interested for
awhile up until a few weeks ago the media buzz finally caught me and *I had
to own it*. So four days ago (before its official release) I began my
search, just in case some store got it in early. Every day after work I
raided the local stores. Two days ago the phone calling started to out of
town places. Finally yesterday I located a copy and picked it up after work
today... but not after stopping by a few places on my way home *just to see
if it was in*. Then the saddest part kicked in. WalMart was putting up a
"GameCube" TV (really a Sanyo but with a GameCube plate over the company
logo. I actually stood and waited around for over 30 minutes watching seven
men attempt to hook up one N64 to the television monitor to 'test it out'.
No GCN was brought out so I left to claim my Devil May Cry.
Sure I've done my share of preordering, buying overpriced Saturn games on
Ebay, and the occasional 14 hour marathon, but looking back, this latest
fiasco was extremely silly, especially since even though Im looking forward
to playing the game, it hasn't really possessed my thoughts and overcome my
total existance like say, Magic Knight Rayearth did a few years back...
Then I donned my cheaply manufactured DMC tshirt and proceeded to play the
game (which rocks by the way)....
I am still wondering where my life went and at what point it fled.
Cheers,
RainStar2k
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There really should be support groups for this sort of thing. You poor dear, at least you don't go around proudly proclaiming yourself hardcore. The self-proclaimed "HaRDc0r3!1" are the true lost souls of our little tribe.
...Well, those guys and people like the poor sap who bought this. I don't care HOW rare a game is, should you really pay five hundred dollars for it? It's a freaking Atari cart. I hope this makes you feel a little better about yourself, RainStar.
| Damn this infernal uterus of mine! |
| Why do you only seem to print female readers' letters?
- AL
|
Well, it's like this - I'm really quite afraid and envious of you big strapping men. I'm intimidated by your massive amounts of testosterone, your bulging muscles, your utter superiority in everything, really. I'm just using this column to get petty, spiteful revenge because I wasn't born with a penis, and the shame of that haunts me every hour of every day of my life.
...Except not really. Hey, I printed your letter, didn't I?
(Honestly though, I print what I get. It just so happens that there seem to be a lot of women gamers who like to write in, what a suprise.)
Closing Comments:
As some of you might or might not have noticed depending on your attention spans, there have been a ton of new games coming out the past few weeks. I'm pretty sure that more than a few of you good good readers have purchased said games, so take the time to tell Drew the biggest disappointments of the lot, and which ones have made you wet your pants with joy. Okage, DMC, ICO...you know what I'm talking about. Play nice while Mommy's at therapy, kids.
-Brooke Bolander, can't...stop...doing...the monkey!
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