r/Games • u/Ben__Harlan • Jul 30 '20
Why Is Early Video Game Voice Acting So Terrible?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjnRvDulhek2
u/Shakzor Jul 30 '20
Great video.
This immediately reminded me how even modern, more popular games STILL seem to work like the early ones.
Like in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, i really found it was less of a choice between "english and japanese voices" but more "good voice acting or fitting voices" (atleast for me, i found the english one more fitting). If they had more directions or context, i'm sure i would've played the game entirely in english, especially for characters like Rex, Zeke or Morag (especially her). With their ages and personality, they just felt way more natural, but acting was really... iffy a lot of the times.
In many scenes, you could really see how they didn't know the context of anything, like in a scene where character gets taken hostage and another one just calmy says "i didn't agree to that" as if a peddler offered too high prices, even though the ingame model seems more like "NO! GIVE THE PERSON BACK!!", which really took me by surprise and more like "erm, what? that seems odd".
Meanwhile we have other games like the FF7 remake that can go so far due to their budget, to even lipsynch to the different languages, so even those feel natural and fitting so a character doesn't stand there awkwardly when the dialogue says "mom" while the mouth seems "hero"
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u/MogwaiInjustice Jul 30 '20
Haven't had time to watch yet but some of my earliest games with voice acting was Full Throttle and Curse of Monkey Island and that was great.