Voice Acting in HW. I forgot...

Put me firmly in the "I really don't care." camp.

I remember "Die, Monster, you don't belong in this world!" and thinking it was the best thing since sliced cheese. Sometimes 'bad' acting can actually add to an experience.

Thus far? I have no overt complaints, aside wanting one or two voice actors to stay. It's better than most Anime dubs in my opinion. Truthfully it actually, at times, emotional nuance that even some single player video games are lacking. (Most of the time Video games ham up the expressions. I'm glad for the more middle road of emotions here.)

Anyways, here's my judgement marker on people who critique voice actors.

If the words "My s-son!" did not tug the crap out of your heartstrings then you're probably half-dead inside and shouldn't be a judge on voice-over quality.

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Originally Posted by Kikoten

I disagree. Hearing that voice come out of little Krile made me wish Lalafells existed in the real world. I'd take her to a movie, maybe dinner, and even BOWLING.

Just kidding, she'd ignore me and get with some bodybuilder or doctor, like women typically do. /foreveralone

That aside, though, really? Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Aymeric and Hauchefaunt and Lucia have that "horrible fake whiney British accent"? Over half the cast has it. What about Brendt and his Slovakian accent? That never rubbed anyone the wrong way?

Weird.

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The voice actor of Ser Aymeric (Blake Ritson) is British.

I guess i'm one of the rare few that likes both the Japanese and English voices..personally, I think people overreact when it comes to it. You want to see horrible English voice acting? Play Vindictus.

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Originally Posted by Seoulstar

I guess i'm one of the rare few that likes both the Japanese and English voices..personally, I think people overreact when it comes to it. You want to see horrible English voice acting? Play Vindictus.

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Or Resident Evil.

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

Or Resident Evil.

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I think players enjoy the bad voice acting in that, though. It's so hilariously bad.

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Originally Posted by Nestama

I think players enjoy the bad voice acting in that, though. It's so hilariously bad.

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RE is a special case because RE is actually supposed to be a spin on silly zombie B-movies and so the bad voice acting plays to that image perfectly. The plot is absolutely ridiculous and the ridiculous voice acting only complements that. Compare to most evaluations of Silent Hill 2 where you'll find nearly everyone thinks James sound like an idiot the entire game (but overlook it because the game is so excellent otherwise)

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Originally Posted by Nestama

I think players enjoy the bad voice acting in that, though. It's so hilariously bad.

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I HOPE THIS ISN'T CHRIS'S BLOOD

It's definitely a growing pain, it's hard to pull away from the old voices cause at a point you just become familiar with them, so a sudden change is very jagged, especially when most have taken up a new accent. Honestly, I think a fair complaint with these current voice actors is the studio they are using to record, they all sound like they are boxed in, as in when they are talking outside, they sound like they are talking inside. It's very enclosed sounding and honestly that sticks out more than anything.

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Originally Posted by Laraul

Voice actors are not a special subset of the "acting" class. It's real acting, and should be considered as such.

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Unfortunately there are a great deal of "Voice Actors" who only voice act because they weren't good enough actors to get a normal acting gig.

Far too many Voice Actors will literally just stand in the recording booth and blithely read the lines off a piece of paper with zero interaction with the scene for which they voicing.

That's not to say that ALL of them do that, There are quite a few really good english Voice Actors, ones who 'act' the part of the character they're trying to be the voice of. Watch a video of the some good Voice Actors going about their recordings and you'll see what i mean.

Thancred's new VA made me die inside... no charm or charisma, it feels like there was no effort put into it. On one hand I don't think the new VA is a suitable replacement, on the other it truly showed SE's completely lacklustre ability to direct english VA's. It's like the actors were given a script with no context to draw from. It's surprising given the effort SE put into most of their other games.

After playing a bit of Fallout 4 these English voices are incredibly disappointing. Obviously it's a given that a multibillion dollar company with a game that's going to raking in more billions is going to have better voice acting, but can't FFXIV hire, I don't know, somewhat decent actors? Ones that put emotion into their voices, like they're actually acting? Given how rare voice acting is in this game, I'd expect it to be of a higher quality, not that I'd want more of the scenes to be VA's with these actors. The disparity is jarring, one moment you have a decent VA (Alphinaud) and the other you have an awful voice actor (Y'shtola, Yugiri, Illberd, etc). I will say though, the voice acting of Heavensward is, for the most part, significantly better than that of ARR. I had to switch to JP voices because of how awful they were, and that's not something I enjoy doing.

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Originally Posted by Sylve

Unfortunately there are a great deal of "Voice Actors" who only voice act because they weren't good enough actors to get a normal acting gig.

Far too many Voice Actors will literally just stand in the recording booth and blithely read the lines off a piece of paper with zero interaction with the scene for which they voicing.

That's not to say that ALL of them do that, There are quite a few really good english Voice Actors, ones who 'act' the part of the character they're trying to be the voice of. Watch a video of the some good Voice Actors going about their recordings and you'll see what i mean.

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Exactly.

There's voicing in HW but you can tell there's no "acting" behind it. I've seen VAs in the studio.

I personally liked Lahabrea's new voice. He was fucking intense during that fight. He shouted some of my favorite war cries in FF14 to date, including "Know your place!", "Your quest ends here!" and "You'll not defeat me again!"

The way the actor delivered those lines made it feel like Lahabrea was actually straining himself to fight you, while 99% of the time it's you who find battles like that extremely ardurous, storywise. Lahabrea's girlfriend, on the other hand (if one could call her that), sounded like she was the cool-headed one... probably because that was her first time facing you, so she hadn't yet experienced the epic Warrior-of-Light asskicking Lahabrea got for the second time in 3.0.

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Originally Posted by BreathlessTao

Funny you should say that. Just today, after actually finishing that quest, I switched to English and re-watched Krile's entry. And ... I wish I hadn't done that. x_x But I was simply curious, just wanted to hear what the English voices are like for a change. It literally made me shiver. For me, it's that what kills immersion, not the Japanese - and I don't speak Japanese. I dunno, I usually don't have any problem with English voices in English games, but here it's just way too weird and foreign to me, not to mention much worse too in my opinion.

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So you don't speak Japanese but you prefer Japanese voice overs? I will never understand this phenomenon among the anime community. It reeks of japonophilia. I would rather turn the sound OFF then listen to something I can't understand. The English isn't so bad that it would make me want to listen to Gibberish instead.

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Originally Posted by Xanikk999

So you don't speak Japanese but you prefer Japanese voice overs? I will never understand this phenomenon among the anime community. It reeks of japonophilia.

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I prefer all foreign media in it's original language, that doesn't make me a frenchaboo for watching a french film. But when applied to japanese things you get labeled a japanophile/weeaboo usually by some who enjoys anime. That is the more mysterious phenomenon.

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Originally Posted by Kikoten

snip

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Well, given that Igeyorhm is the ice-based one of the two, you'll have to forgive the pun, but she most definitely probably was the cooler-headed one.

Maybe it's just me not being terribly fond of Scottish accents, but I felt it didn't fit on Lahabrea at all. Alec Newman's a fine actor, though.

PS: Lahabrea has the best lines, no exception.

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Originally Posted by MeeDeggiThePunisher

I prefer all foreign media in it's original language, that doesn't make me a frenchaboo for watching a french film. But when applied to japanese things you get labeled a japanophile/weeaboo usually by some who enjoys anime. That is the more mysterious phenomenon.

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Ok fair enough. It doesn't make sense to me though. I could understand if you knew the language but whatever.

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Originally Posted by Xanikk999

So you don't speak Japanese but you prefer Japanese voice overs? I will never understand this phenomenon among the anime community. It reeks of japonophilia. I would rather turn the sound OFF then listen to something I can't understand. The English isn't so bad that it would make me want to listen to Gibberish instead.

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Yeah, how unnatural to want to see a work in the language it was created in rather than adapted into. Only anime fans have ever been like this in the history of entertainment. I think it's amazing anyone is actually obtuse enough to make that presumption.

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Originally Posted by KeluBehemoth

Raubahns voice pre HW was SO strong! Alphinaud had character! They sounded unique.

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I disagree. Honestly, Raubahn sounded very unnatural. Its as if the voice actor was trying to be gruff while maintaining an accent and it came off as very awkward. His HW voice is much more natural, although that might be due to his VA actually being British this time. You have me at Alphinaud, but I think both are good. I feel like the new voice fits his character development a bit more, as his pre HW voice was good for his character at the time: A naive, and a bit snide, character.

The only voices I really wish they didn't change were Urianger's and Merlwyb's.

I'm on the fence with this issue, while a few of the changes are bad (Gideon emery why???) I love some of the new voice acting. I actually really liked aphinaud's new voice, before he struck me as unlikable and stuck up, which I guess is what his character was supposed to be, then he got fleshed out more in HW and we now see that he is actually just a kid waay out of his depth (this was shown massively in 3.1), and his voice actor change is very fitting for this new characterisation of childlike and naive.

Also matoya's voice acting is spot on, it always excites me to hear more sass from the grumpy old woman.

I miss Alphinaud's voice from 2.x... it's way better than his 3.x voice to me as the 2.x had a unique charm to it that really gave him personality and whenever I think back to the HW dialogue I always imagine his 2.x in my head instead. Also dislike what they did to Illberd, Raubahn, Merlwyb Bloefhiswyn, Urianger, Lahabrea and a few others as well. Actually I dislike a good portion of the 3.x voice cast and I want the 2.x voice actors back. It's like the sudden change of voices for Aeris from KH1 to KH2.

It's my preference, though I don't understand why people "hated" Alphinaud's 2.x voice so much it fit him and personality perfectly. His new 3.x sounds better fit if he was older as an adult somewhere around the middle 20's.

It's a mixed bag, but I find 3.x's voice poorer than 2.x and I regard 2.x the better of the two with high esteem when it comes to voice acting.

I love the VA, and I pity anyone who skips cutscenes. Especially in HW. HW's plot was amazing.

Don't mind the English voices really, you know the VAs were just thrown a script and told to act it out with little more reference than a basic scenario. And if you're comparing actors vs. voice actors, well, didn't they hire some bigshot actor to do Snake/Venom Snake's voice recently to pretty lousy reviews? Maybe real actors can't voice act either.

Krile though... I don't know if I've just been conditioned by FFXI and FFXIV character voices to expect them to be high pitched squeakers, but her having such a deep voice kind of puts me off, kind of like 2.x's Pipin and Ilberd's lacky.

SE runs FFXIV with a really limited dev team and budget despite the game being a huge success. It's not only for higher profits but they are afraid to pull another 1.0. Something needs to be done though. Seems they can't afford the same actors for a long period and they always change them. I know that many times actors are not available at the given time but here they change so often and so many that led to be believe it's done for cost reduction reasons. I know about the Japanese voices but I hate them too. Can't stand those childish and over reacting anime style voices. I liked the English voices pre 3.0. Kan-E-Seena Merlywyb, Raubahn, Scions everybody had way better voices. Some of them saw a voice change before 3.0 in the 2.X series and some other after 3.0. I just hate it. They are trying to create nice cutscenes but the voice issue kills it some times. The game started showing its weakness due the budget and its small dev team.

I think that the voice acting for all of the characters are way better than pre 3.0.

2.x Merlwyb anyone? lol

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Originally Posted by Velox

Laughing Tidus would like to have a word with you

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That feeling when people still refer to this scene in the wrong context... it makes me wonder if anyone even played FFX :C

Anyway, the most recent VA in HW to make me cry inside is... a certain Scion. You know who I'm talking about. So terrible.

so, we are whining about this as well? o.O

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Originally Posted by KeluBehemoth

...British accents.

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I can see your disposition, you are comparing ingame stuff to irl stuff. There is no Britain in Eorzea, just think of their voice acting as Eorzean accents and dialect.

This game would lose 100 to 1 in comparison to IRL, but that's exactly why we play it amirite?

I'm actually used to the voice actors now, some of them are way better than ARR, some worse (Merl!!!!) but we can't have everything. I think Krile's VA is actually one of my favourites...she totally surprised me, and especially how sarcastic she is to Alphinaud...loving it!

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Originally Posted by Eimian_Eda

That feeling when people still refer to this scene in the wrong context... it makes me wonder if anyone even played FFX :C

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Yeah... I wonder if they saw the JP version of that scene.

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Originally Posted by BrokenFox

I love Steve Blum (Spike), but he's definitely over used.. especially in TOR, lol. He's everywhere in that game. BioWare handles the english voice acting game a lot better than SE does though.

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that voice actor in just in about everything period he also voices tom from toonami do u know how freaky it was to watch toonami and cowboy bebop XD before adult swim was made?
he was funny in gureen laggen him and crispin freeman have a lil rivalry as them 2 are in just about everything.

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

Or Resident Evil.

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or two worlds 1

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Maybe someone has more knowledge about this, but if this issue is low budget for the voice actors, how come only the English ones got replaced? Are the Japanese voice actors alot cheaper or are they prioritising it so that majority of the funds for VA goes to maintaining the Japanese voice actors?

I have spoken to some of the 2.0 voice actors via social media and majority of them, were unaware that they were replaced and when I told them that their character got a new voice actor, they were suprised why they werent called back. So either SE was not happy with their preformance (realy they replaced gideon emery... why?) or they lacked the funds to keep them. The thing I am wondering is, if it is the funds. how come the none of the Japanese voice actors got replaced?

Maybe someone here knows more about the VA business and is willling to share some of his or her knowledge?

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Originally Posted by Eimian_Eda

That feeling when people still refer to this scene in the wrong context... it makes me wonder if anyone even played FFX :C

Anyway, the most recent VA in HW to make me cry inside is... a certain Scion. You know who I'm talking about. So terrible.

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i played it twice if not more, that scene was poorly voice acted -_-;; didn't help tidus voice sounded like a bratty tween who balls didn't drop yet. honestly ffx just isn't voiced very well, alot of the english voices don't fit who their playing. Only Lulu and khimari sounded good, everyone else sounded off. ffx-2 was better voiced.

I like the English voice actors - thought they all did a wonderful job. If the voice actors union goes on strike - we might not see any for quite some time. Enjoy it while we have it.

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Originally Posted by Azazua_azura

i played it twice if not more, that scene was poorly voice acted -_-;; didn't help tidus voice sounded like a bratty tween who balls didn't drop yet. honestly ffx just isn't voiced very well, alot of the english voices don't fit who their playing. Only Lulu and khimari sounded good, everyone else sounded off. ffx-2 was better voiced.

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The laughing is supposed to sound forced, since they're trying to smile and laugh without really being happy. I don't know about you, but forcing a laugh is kind of difficult. (You'll notice they start to actually laugh afterwards because the whole thing was so silly). So regardless of whether or not the entire game's VA was good or bad, that particular scene is still improperly used as an example.

I personally love the English voice actors. I don't really see what everyone hates about them. I've seen some horrible dubs in the past, but XIV is nothing like that. People sound like they have real emotions with what they are saying, they don't sound like they are reading a script. Just go to youtube or google and search for "Bad English Dubbing" or something and you will see a clear example of bad English voice actors.

I had a bit of a problem with the new voice actors since I was so used to the old ones, but after a while it seems to have grown on me.

My personal favorite horrid voice acting is from the game Chaos Wars. They took some of the characters from Shadow Hearts: Covenant and just made them... sound hilarious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAtC1SzWSXg

I personally love the new voice for Alphinaud. His last voice really grated upon my ears.

I was pretty disappointed this patch that they no longer had Haurchefaunt narrating the story.

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Originally Posted by Xanikk999

Ok fair enough. It doesn't make sense to me though. I could understand if you knew the language but whatever.

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It actually has helped me quite a bit in learning the language.
While I'm by no means fluent nor even capable of speaking or writing it properly, i am however able to understand a fair chunk of whats being said. Rosetta Stone is a great learning tool, but actually having cause to use what I'm learning is only assisting me in learning the language.

I just wish English VAs would stop ruining what would be a good performance by being 30+ and trying to sound 15 ... But that's less the VAs fault and more on the one responsible for selecting that person to a character they don't have a natural sounding voice for.