What are your thoughts on the voice acting?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rynia

I only recognised one voice actor in the English while playing, and that was Urianger - the voice of Balthier for crying out loud, miscast of epic proportions there. So few lines for such a great VA, and on top of that he would have suited Thancred so well (imo, obviously).

A quick glance at the cast lists I can find include several big names who don't even voice a named character (Steve Blum, Claudia Black, Nolan fricking North) while all the named characters I can find are voiced by relative unknowns. I find this mind-boggling, but can applaud SE for giving people who aren't "names" the chance to show their stuff.

What bothers me about the voice acting, however, is how terrible pretty much all the VAs are at English accents. They all sound like Americans putting on a bad "posh" accent, Minfilia being the worst of the lot. As a British person, it really grates.

---

1) Yes.

2) Yes.

3) So much yes, though it's Yda's mockney that hurts me the most.

I think the newer stuff has gotten better. The earlier cutscenes everyone talks SOOOOOOOO SLOOOOOOOOOW. I feel like I'm being patronized.

Edit: Why does everyone think that fantasy genres need to have fake english accents in the first place? Why can't people just speak however their natural voice sounds?

My thoughts on the voice acting are very lopsided.

On one hand, I agree with most of you that majority of the english acting isn't all that good.

However despite that, I wish all of the cutscenes were fully voiced rather than just a select few of them. It feels very half-assed when so few scenes have voices.

Waste of money to me. Not that I don't like hearing voices, but in an MMO I feel that it would be money spent better in other places.

The voice acting is really forced and wooden. I find VA in most games to be like this. The Mass Effect series is one of the few series where the VA is consistently good.

Personally, I'd rather they skipped it entirely and spent the development time (and the not insubstantial amount of money) on other things. but I know it's a selling point for people who would rather not read.

I don't like the current situation.

We get a cutscene with voice acting followed by another with text.
It feels unfinished but I don't mind the quality of the recordings.

They should decide to either go all out and add voice acting to the whole main story, or just skip any voice acting and instead create more cutscenes to improve immersion.

You know, running from one static NPC to another, or even to the same NPC in another area is not entertaining and can destroy the best story.

NPC - "Go meet me at *****. I have important information!"
Me - *Why can't he just tell me?!*
After arriving at the new location...
NPC - "Good to see you!"
Me - *Wth, you just sent me here!*
NPC - "Now listen. Before we can continue, you have to bring me a piece of booze because I can't talk without a drink."
Me - *...*
After running back to where I just came from, to bring that NPC his stuff...
NPC - "Ah, finally!"
Me - *Now talk, or I'll kill you.*
NPC - "Do you remember when I told you I had important information?"
Me - *That was like 5 minutes ago...*
NPC - "It's very important...in fact it's so important that we shouldn't discuss this here."
Me - *No way, that's not really happening...*
NPC - "Let's move back to town. I'll tell you the details there."
Me - *WHYYYYYYY?!*

Something like that ^^

I feel that the VAs were doing a much better job this time around (less odd inflections, somewhat more natural speech), but I still believe that they should have just rehired the original cast from FFXII. Heck, so many of the characters from XII transfer over incredibly well to XIV's--Balthier and Thancred, Ashe and Minfillia, etc. Or course I'm still curious about, while I've never played 1.0, why couldn't they just get back all of the original VAs?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mysteltain

I feel that the VAs were doing a much better job this time around (less odd inflections, somewhat more natural speech), but I still believe that they should have just rehired the original cast from FFXII. Heck, so many of the characters from XII transfer over incredibly well to XIV's--Balthier and Thancred, Ashe and Minfillia, etc. Or course I'm still curious about, while I've never played 1.0, why couldn't they just get back all of the original VAs?

---

Only a very few CS were voiced in V1. The intros for each city and... Futures Perfect, I believe?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Aegis

Only a very few CS were voiced in V1. The intros for each city and... Futures Perfect, I believe?

---

Ahh, okay. That makes a bit more sense.

I think the voice acting is fine. I am not picky. As long as it doesn't sound like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAtC1SzWSXg then I won't be so anal about it.

I will however say that they did a poor job putting voice acting in when appropriate. I understand that not every bit of dialogue was to have voice acting, but one big mistake they did is not giving certain characters a voice when you first meet them, like most of Gaius's officers. When you introduce an important character and have voice casting, it is pretty mandatory you introduce them with the voice actor giving the dialogue to let the player know what type of voice that character has. I think they have done better on this in 2.2, but it was something that bugged me in the main scenario.

Normal unvoiced over CS, they use normal speech. The Voice over they keep tossing in words that seem out of place vs the rest of the text.
I also don't like the pacing of voice over CS. They should run like a movie without having to click threw them.

If it was paced better without having to click threw it I think most of my issues would be resolved which I'm not getting into.

Also the half missed CS without voice over in the main story line just breaks up the pace even more.
Do great CS story great Cut out of the voiced over CS only to enter another that isn't, also kills the pace for me.

I'm not saying do a voice over for every main story line CS. like when you are out in the field and you talk to a NPC and he says go get this. Fine no Voice over. But really every CS where the screen fade to black before should be voiced over.

JP VAs - Pretty solid.
EN VAs - Not, uh... good... not good...

Even the JP voices are distractingly intermittent though. Either give everyone voices or give no one voices, as it is I'm always wondering why if something is wrong.

Hmm ...

1. I really like the approach SE went with the VA. In the sense that doing VOs for everything is way too costly / prohibitive, but doing VOs for just the main story quest stuff and cutscenes is a good balance and improves immersion.

2. I don't have a major hangup with the actual VA. Some are kind of meh, but I like them overall. I don't have high expectations for MMORPG voice acting.

Don't know if anyone else posted the same but hire the voice actors from SWTOR! They at least did a very good job. No need for all scenes of course just the main story line or longer CS.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lusavari

I preferred Yda's 1.0 voice as it matched her personality more. I do like Y'shtola. I'm not overly critical of the acting quality though. We're not seeing the full context in the previews of what's going on, plus you have to deal with MMO limitations on the facial expressions in CSes. I wouldn't be shocked to learn the VOs were done before many scenes were even animated. Most of Cid's dialog is fine with me except this Praetorium Linkshell messages. Those get pretty bad. In many ways it gets a little cheesy...

But, sometimes, you just need to learn to embrace the cheese.

---

I was shocked to hear how bad the voice acting was in ARR. They didn't change the VO's, so maybe your reason is why the quality degraded? Compare Yda and Papalymo. http://youtu.be/t2ahpI7XvlU?t=2m20s

The main issue I have is it always sounds like they are proclaiming a speech or something. Minfilia is probably the worst in that case. There are a few characters that have ok voices though like the leader of Ul'dah and Van Baelsar.

My only thought is what voice acting? A little sarcasm there but I've completed the main story and the voice acted scenes are few and far between. Don't really understand how there can be so little voice acting in this game while games like ESO have literally every quest/dialogue voice acted and done well at that. I remember reading prior to the launch of 2.0 that there would be lots of voice acting in this game and have been sadly disappointed up to this point. I personally get a lot of immersion out of voice acted cutscenes and in my opinion they really need to put more effort into that, at least for the main scenario. Then again the main scenario quests in 2.2 are garbage too so I'm probably setting my standards too high or something.

I would rather play on JP client to read original Japanese text and Japanse voice acting. English version is just horriable to bear with, for me at least.

I rather like Merlwyb, and Kan-E is pretty much exactly spot on for me. Thancred and Minfilia don't fit at all for me. Yda and Papalymo are OK. So on and so forth. What surprised me is Uriangier (sp!). As much of a Gideon Emery fanboy that I am, it sure sounds like he phoned this performance in. He sounds *bored.*

I think the voice acting is terrible in English, but good/solid in Japanese..
But... I think they should've voiced EVERYTHING in the main story, not just a few parts.
I can imagine voicing everything is really expensive, but please do all the important quests @_@

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Fendred

On the Japanese side they have some very talented voice actors that have casted in various anime and games. I haven't looked at the english voice actor list, but I don't know if I'd recognize any names there. I think the voice actors probably didn't get a whole lot of input on how their character's were supposed to sound, and a lot of the lines are not necessarily standard English. Plus, in the case of some characters like the Maelstrom leader, what is meant by a "strong female character" voice means something different in Japan's culture than it does in the U.S.

---

Yea the UK has a lot of decent voice actors also, the majority of good voice actors in the US are also film actors and expensive.

JP voice acting is quite nice, but the problem is there is not enough of it.

While I appreciate the edits made to things like quest titles and such to make them humorous puns and whatnot, I do NOT like when they totally change dialog. "Kore wa..." does not equal "Gods forfend..."

This isn't a translation. It's a localization. If you don't know the difference, go look it up on Google.

This isn't anime where they're just doing a mere translation.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Vilhem

This isn't a translation. It's a localization. If you don't know the difference, go look it up on Google.

This isn't anime where they're just doing a mere translation.

---

Sometimes it seems rather arbitrary though. I was just playing through the story recently with japanese audio and when they are talking about the 1.0 events the japanese keeps saying "Go Nen mae" or "5 years ago" while the English never mentions how long ago it was during these scenes.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Bocajo

Sometimes it seems rather arbitrary though. I was just playing through the story recently with japanese audio and when they are talking about the 1.0 events the japanese keeps saying "Go Nen mae" or "5 years ago" while the English never mentions how long ago it was during these scenes.

---

They do in Gridania.

The English voice acting is good, and I'm glad to see that FFXIV is doing more voice acting for the story.
I know some people only like Japanese voice acting, but I appreciate both the original and the localization effort.
It makes the game more accessible and shows commitment and appreciation for fans around the world.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Vilhem

This isn't a translation. It's a localization. If you don't know the difference, go look it up on Google.

This isn't anime where they're just doing a mere translation.

---

If you think they don't localize anime, you don't watch much anime. XD

Pretty much ALL contemporary anime is localized, not just a straight translation. Part of this is by necessity, to better match the lip-flaps of the on-screen characters, but a lot of it has to do with finding local functional substitutes for obscure Japanese culture references.

Whether localization is done poorly or well varies by show (and by your own personal opinion), but it's definitely there.

On the topic of film actors making better voice actors, that's not necessarily true, either. Film actors are used to expressing themselves through facial expressions and body movements, as well as through vocal inflection. For local productions, like Disney films, the animators are free to animate the characters to better follow the film actors' performances. There is no such luxury for dubbed shows - big film actors that sign on for a show like Princess Mononoke (or any Japanese video game) tend to be amatures compared to folks who spend a lot more time in the voice industry, and require many more takes and a lot of coaching to get the job done.

Terrible. Time to hire new people!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LineageRazor

If you think they don't localize anime, you don't watch much anime. XD

Pretty much ALL contemporary anime is localized, not just a straight translation. Part of this is by necessity, to better match the lip-flaps of the on-screen characters, but a lot of it has to do with finding local functional substitutes for obscure Japanese culture references.

Whether localization is done poorly or well varies by show (and by your own personal opinion), but it's definitely there.

---

I don't watch anime anymore, but yes I do know some of it is localized (mainly the dubs). It's a necessary process, something people (obviously in this thread) don't understand. There's all this talk about "original intent" etc yada yada, yet they don't speak a lick of JP to reliably tell the difference and rely on "subs".

It also amuses me how these same people claim the JPs do a better job of voice acting, when they're not familiar with the language at all. In the case of FFXIV, all four "dubs" (look I used another anime buzzword!) are horribly produced, but the fault doesn't lie with the actors, its the cutscene designs themselves. Some of this is indirectly mentioned by previous posts in this thread: spoken dialogue not matching body movement, odd silences, lip movements not matching ANY of the audios (not even JP!).

They're reading text-based designed cutscenes, so of course they're VERY limited on what kind of acting they can do. This is producing backwards from a normal pipeline: record voices first then animate characters to fit said dialogue.

Fun-fact: All four "dubs" were produced at the same time, so the JP isn't "original".

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Vilhem

This isn't a translation. It's a localization. If you don't know the difference, go look it up on Google.

This isn't anime where they're just doing a mere translation.

---

Anime is localized... perhaps some dub jobs are shit, but the vast majority is localized. One of the best examples I watched recently is the Steins;Gate series, where they localized it to the point where even the jokes and references were adapted to make sense to a western audience, it was very well done.

Back to OP, the weird slang that the characters use in Eorzea isn't totally offputting to me, but the lack of quality with the english voice actors is. It could be a case of poor voice directors, or the actors themselves just aren't up to snuff. Urianger's voice actor is the same as Fenris from Dragon Age 2, and in DA2 he is lightyears better, so maybe the director's also at fault.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gaddes

Anime is localized... perhaps some dub jobs are shit, but the vast majority is localized. One of the best examples I watched recently is the Steins;Gate series, where they localized it to the point where even the jokes and references were adapted to make sense to a western audience, it was very well done.

---

I guess I should have clarified that by "translation" I was referring to those sub-only releases, since dubs are becoming rarer anyway. Most weebs prefer subs anyway because "omg original" etc >_>

1.0 voice acting for as little as there was seemed much more professional in my opinion. I miss the old voices, especially the old character voices. Why did they have to get rid of those instead keeping them and adding more?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nikita

1.0 voice acting for as little as there was seemed much more professional in my opinion. I miss the old voices, especially the old character voices. Why did they have to get rid of those instead keeping them and adding more?

---

I wondered that myself, but perhaps it was contract related, or they couldn't book them anytime soon to do the recordings

The 1.0 cutscenes WERE more professional: you could tell the audio was recorded first, then the characters animated to match it. Even the lip movements matched (though in 1.0, the only audio was English, even for JP client. The subs are the only thing that changed)


A curious fun fact though: Back when you could browse the 1.0 dats, there were some audio files of the 1.0 cutscenes, which sounded like "rough takes" or demo recordings, they used the SAME cast as ARR. I was confused by it at first when I started playing ARR, and I heard Yda and Thancred and was like "where have I heard those voices before?" lol

So it sounds like our current cast was much more accessible than say.. Crispin Freeman (Thancred's 1.0 VA)

There are so many negative thoughts on the voice acting, which are pretty well justified, imo. MY thoughts are, would there be anyone willing to prove their own VA talents (or of anyone you know) to make a fan-based editted version of voice acting for all characters over as many cutscenes as possible, to show SE what fans would REALLY like in terms of VA?

Yes, it would be fan-made, time consuming, and probably break ToS if posted....... but if it turns out truly epic, how many people would follow through with it? The fans know what they want, right? We don't just post demands, do we?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ruinedmirage

There are so many negative thoughts on the voice acting, which are pretty well justified, imo. MY thoughts are, would there be anyone willing to prove their own VA talents (or of anyone you know) to make a fan-based editted version of voice acting for all characters over as many cutscenes as possible, to show SE what fans would REALLY like in terms of VA?

Yes, it would be fan-made, time consuming, and probably break ToS if posted....... but if it turns out truly epic, how many people would follow through with it? The fans know what they want, right? We don't just post demands, do we?

---

https://www.youtube.com/user/Vagrant4dead

The end-production is pretty much how the ARR cutscenes turned out: mostly reading with acting limited by already animated characters. The voice actors themselves, though fans they may be, sound so much better when you just hear the demos they submitted for the project (I was/am still a part of this project so I get to hear that stuff <_<) They're all really talented people!

Ninja edit: I wanted to add that this fandub was produced before ARR even released