Please give English Speakers more respect. Dawntrail terrible English voice acting

The voice acting was standard for the game, and fine. I have a bigger issue that the full MSQ was not voiced.

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

Personally, I disliked Wuk both as a character and her English VA before I knew anything at all about the actor. Another idea that would be nice though: The ability to change languages in a per character basis. So I could put Wuk on JP and leave everyone else English.

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BRB, hard locking Uraigner to English

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Originally Posted by Reimmi

She can't do any voice that isn't neutral
When wuk yells, she's flat
when wuk is sarcastic, she's flat
when wuk is sad, she's flat

I hope we don't see much of her in the future because she may be the worst voice actor i've heard since ARR

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This. Legitimately feels as if the VA has the worst voice intonation possible for fear of not being able to do the accent otherwise and it just makes the entire performance grating.

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Originally Posted by Plushy

Another example...erenville has an Icelandic accent...so why does his mom have an American accent? Like what??
Where did he get that accent? Is he faking?
The voice director couldn't even be bothered to get an Icelandic women to voice his mother.

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I couldn't agree more, i didn't like that they did this, no matter how long she was inside gold amaurot or whatever other excuse they wanna make for it, it didn't feel right at all.

So, there always were bad performances of voice acting in this game. Why do we now get multiple threads about this issue?

Also, do people here know how voice acting even works? Voice actors don't sit at home, get to see the nice cutscenes we do and then speak into the mic. They go to a studio, someone there gives them the script and tells them how to read it. 99% of the time they don't even get any context of the spoken lines or any visual aid.

Yes, that does not excuse bad voice acting. But most of the time it's also the fault of the director. But people only ever blame the voice actor.

And in this case, it's always while mentioning that Wuk Lamat's voice actor is trans.

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Originally Posted by iRanOverYourMom

i feel like the voice acting from wuk lamat is due to the forced accent, rather than her being inherently bad. During one particular emotional scene, she was really good. But it does seem she does seem flat is a good amount of cutscenes, almost as if being held back by the direction that the story wants to force accents for consistency sake.

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"But the voice actor is Porta Rican!" Is all i'm seeing, instead of getting an actual Porta Rican VA that doesn't have to put on a voice, they went this route, so many things could have been done though honestly, and Wuk is only a small part of the boring story.

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Originally Posted by IvoryHawk

"But the voice actor is Porta Rican!" Is all i'm seeing, instead of getting an actual Porta Rican VA that doesn't have to put on a voice, they went this route, so many things could have been done though honestly, and Wuk is only a small part of the boring story.

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The VA is a half Puerto Rican that grew up on the East Coast, but that doesn't mean anything as far as I'm concerned. I'm half Mexican and lived in the American Southwest from CA to TX and every state in between. The only time I can do a "Mexican" accent is when I'm actually speaking Spanish. If I try in English, it just comes off as forced and bordering on offensive. That's how Wuk's "accent" sounds to me. They just say the VA is Puerto Rican like it's some sort of pass and that linguistics are passed down genetically.

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Originally Posted by Shialan

So, there always were bad performances of voice acting in this game. Why do we now get multiple threads about this issue?

Also, do people here know how voice acting even works? Voice actors don't sit at home, get to see the nice cutscenes we do and then speak into the mic. They go to a studio, someone there gives them the script and tells them how to read it. 99% of the time they don't even get any context of the spoken lines or any visual aid.

Yes, that does not excuse bad voice acting. But most of the time it's also the fault of the director. But people only ever blame the voice actor.

And in this case, it's always while mentioning that Wuk Lamat's voice actor is trans.

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I suppose the difference is probably that Wuk Lmao has 7000 spoken words of dialogue, twice as many as the next character in dawntrail... Kinda a problem if they can't voice act. People are going to complain.

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Originally Posted by lolnotacat

The VA is a half Puerto Rican that grew up on the East Coast, but that doesn't mean anything as far as I'm concerned. I'm half Mexican and lived in the American Southwest from CA to TX and every state in between. The only time I can do a "Mexican" accent is when I'm actually speaking Spanish. If I try in English, it just comes off as forced and bordering on offensive. That's how Wuk's "accent" sounds to me. They just say the VA is Puerto Rican like it's some sort of pass and that linguistics are passed down genetically.

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Exactly what i was getting at yeah, there was even a video recently of all the new cast on the Alphinaud channel with all the VA cast, everyone but Sena actually sounds like their character, so why go with someone that has to make the accent

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Originally Posted by Shialan

So, there always were bad performances of voice acting in this game. Why do we now get multiple threads about this issue?

Also, do people here know how voice acting even works? Voice actors don't sit at home, get to see the nice cutscenes we do and then speak into the mic. They go to a studio, someone there gives them the script and tells them how to read it. 99% of the time they don't even get any context of the spoken lines or any visual aid.

Yes, that does not excuse bad voice acting. But most of the time it's also the fault of the director. But people only ever blame the voice actor.

And in this case, it's always while mentioning that Wuk Lamat's voice actor is trans.

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If it was a random side character with poor VA, no one would care. This is the main character of the expansion with more voiced dialogue then any other character, which should be held to a higher standard. And the actor's gender does not matter in the slightest here.

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

And the actor's gender does not matter in the slightest here.

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To be fair, it matters to Wuk's VA.

https://i.imgur.com/JUDUcMe.jpeg

I did the entire DT expansion with JP voices and while I was watching some streams with the EN variant I was shocked at how different it sounded, especially Erenville and Wuk Lamat.

Frankly, I sway much more toward faulty directing than VA per se. It's their responsibility to make sure the scenes and the energy are matched and it sounded like it didn't. JP VA for Wuk Lamat was absolutely outstanding and the directing for everyone was just 10/10.

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Originally Posted by IvoryHawk

Exactly what i was getting at yeah, there was even a video recently of all the new cast on the Alphinaud channel with all the VA cast, everyone but Sena actually sounds like their character, so why go with someone that has to make the accent

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To be fair, the vast majority of the Turali cast is faking their (Mexican) Spanish-American accent, and in the casting department's defense, you can only really reasonably ask for a certain accent on the call sheet -- not that it necessarily be genuine. Although it seems clear, based on what what we currently know, that they did go out of their way to cast Latino actors as well.

I'm of two minds on the accent thing anyway, because while it's true that some sound silly or borderline offensive, I also think it's true that actors, whose first language actually isn't English, can sometimes give strange and stilted performances. Case in point: Erenville's actor, who (I can tell by some of his very weird line readings) didn't always quite grasp what he was saying. But that's as much on his director as any other of these performances.

I thought the voice acting was pretty good by FFXIV standards. Wuk Lamat was kinda meh at some points, but I really enjoyed both of the two-headed Mamool Ja, Erenville's mom, and Koana. Sphene was good as well.

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Originally Posted by Sacae

I thought the voice acting was pretty good by FFXIV standards. Wuk Lamat was kinda meh at some points, but I really enjoyed both of the two-headed Mamool Ja, Erenville's mom, and Koana. Sphene was good as well.

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Also that one guy in the cowboy zone that sounded like Sam Elliott.

Sena's performance just sucks and judging by her tweets, she is incapable of taking criticism and blames her lack of roles on her being trans rather than due to her skill.
I implore anyone who believes it's purely a voice direction issue to look at her previous work.
I dunno how she managed to land the role of Wuk Lamat at all, but I doubt anything at all would ever be said or done about it

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Originally Posted by lolnotacat

To be fair, it matters to Wuk's VA.

https://i.imgur.com/JUDUcMe.jpeg

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tbf, not everyone use english VA so don't include VA gendre in character discussion

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Originally Posted by Caitlinzulu

Are people not allowed to like Wuk Lamaty? I do at least. Lucky not everyone is the same or it would all be boring.
Also this is plain criticism which is everyone s right to have but to call it "valid" criticism is trying to make it more important then it is, just a personal opinion.

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The problem is people are being extremely rude about it. That's what got previous threads deleted.

It is fine to criticize the acting. Not the Actor. The minute someone points to anything about the actor that isn't in-game, they're basically hating the "choice of actor for some reason that has nothing to do with the game."

There are at least two other voice actors in game, who's studio recordings are of a vastly different quality than everyone elses, so they stick out. That is not Square-Enix's fault. That is the studio who did the recordings.

Voice direction is also going to be the studio's fault. We do not know much about this, and it ultimately only matters a small amount, since the game is written in Japanese first, not English. So we can only ever expect the best-effort localization and voice acting based on it. There are clearly some lines that Wuk Lamat's voice actor failed to deliver, probably from inexperience, but I felt more of that writing in general.

Like overall, I give the writing a C+ during the 7 mcguffins, and a B for everything after in the MSQ. It almost feels like everything from before the train ride was written to support what came after. Like Wuk Lamat is not alone in some strange voice deliveries, again, mostly in the 7 Mcguffins. I suspect there was some penny pinching going on with the voice over budget, because it seems like far more scenes are unvoiced, yet seemingly important, for no other reason than there are too many people in them.

Y'all love dragging out that quote. Has nothing to do with the performance. She's no worse than the other terrible VA we have in this game, SE frankly just doesn't want to hire top talent. And I know they could afford it.

Or maybe they are too hard to work with and folks like Jennifer Hale turn down the roles. Who knows. But the fixation on this particular actress's personal life and opinions is over the top. Let's discuss how bad this xpac OVERALL just is. Writing, direction, all of it, it's just bad, more of the same, treadmill, dull. There is nothing new or exciting and that just exacerbates everything else.

I think that folks don't appreciate how difficult it can be to bring life to a character that is already written with a terrible identity. The traits the author intended to be endearing are instead obnoxious, they can't seem to decide on an accent for the folks in this region (or ANY region, for that matter), and the overall missing identity of the game in general all makes the VA feel worse than objectively it is. She's articulate, it's not nails on a chalkboard, we just have a real deep-seated problem with the way they constructed this xpac overall that I'm not sure even an actress like Jennifer Hale could have carried it. This is a HEAVY lift.

Is Wuk Lamat's VA great? No, she didn't knock it out of the park. But neither is she as bad as some of you are intent on saying she is. A lot of it is direction - the slow, halting way most of the characters speak because that's how JP think Americans actually communicate is 100% direction. I end up skipping many cutscenes because I've read the text and the character hasn't gotten past the first half-sentence. No VA can overcome that and while maybe I'd let it play just to hear Keith David talk, it's just another reminder that SE literally thinks NA is too stupid to have things like -aga spells. Or normal conversations.

Nah she wants to talk shit publicly, that conversation is our business especially since she's the face of the expansion

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Originally Posted by Souljacker

Y'all love dragging out that quote. Has nothing to do with the performance. She's no worse than the other terrible VA we have in this game, SE frankly just doesn't want to hire top talent. And I know they could afford it.

Or maybe they are too hard to work with and folks like Jennifer Hale turn down the roles. Who knows. But the fixation on this particular actress's personal life and opinions is over the top. Let's discuss how bad this xpac OVERALL just is. Writing, direction, all of it, it's just bad, more of the same, treadmill, dull. There is nothing new or exciting and that just exacerbates everything else.

I think that folks don't appreciate how difficult it can be to bring life to a character that is already written with a terrible identity. The traits the author intended to be endearing are instead obnoxious, they can't seem to decide on an accent for the folks in this region (or ANY region, for that matter), and the overall missing identity of the game in general all makes the VA feel worse than objectively it is. She's articulate, it's not nails on a chalkboard, we just have a real deep-seated problem with the way they constructed this xpac overall that I'm not sure even an actress like Jennifer Hale could have carried it. This is a HEAVY lift.

Is Wuk Lamat's VA great? No, she didn't knock it out of the park. But neither is she as bad as some of you are intent on saying she is. A lot of it is direction - the slow, halting way most of the characters speak because that's how JP think Americans actually communicate is 100% direction. I end up skipping many cutscenes because I've read the text and the character hasn't gotten past the first half-sentence. No VA can overcome that and while maybe I'd let it play just to hear Keith David talk, it's just another reminder that SE literally thinks NA is too stupid to have things like -aga spells. Or normal conversations.

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If SE still thinks NA is too stupid to have aga spells, thats a problem of the inhouse Localizers

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Originally Posted by Karious

Nah she wants to talk shit publicly, that conversation is our business especially since she's the face of the expansion

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Fair enough, but I think y'all need to focus on her performance if you want to criticize her performance. Folks are allowed to have opinions and there's some validity to wanting a character that's portrayed as representative of your identity being voiced by someone who brings authenticity to that identity. I get it. I may be of the mind that ANY representation is better than what we all had before and accept them as the good faith gestures I believe they are, but being a cis woman who's been relegated to the back seat for so long I guess I have been conditioned to have a less strong opinion about stuff like that anyway. And it has nothing at all to do with Wuk Lamat or this glaringly bad xpac.

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Originally Posted by ZodaSoda

If SE still thinks NA is too stupid to have aga spells, thats a problem of the inhouse Localizers

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Can't divorce them from the company. It's insulting they thought folks new to FF couldn't read a tooltip, instead they made everyone who already HAD been playing FF for their entire lives reacclimate to this silliness. It's an example of how little they think about us that SE didn't take a stand on it and let them basically shit all over 30+ years of lore.

Yea, that makes me salty.

Unfortunately, it was clear that the VA was already straining her voice when Wuk was talking normally. Which resulted in her not having enough range to properly manage other tones resulting in most yelling scenes sounding incredibly flat.

Though some of it should have also been amended in post-production.

It's kind of like Eric Carman from south park. Originally Trey Parker was voicing Eric completely on his own, but it ended up straining his throat too much that they had to change it to a more normal voice during production and then changing the lines in post-prod.

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Originally Posted by Shialan

So, there always were bad performances of voice acting in this game. Why do we now get multiple threads about this issue?

Also, do people here know how voice acting even works? Voice actors don't sit at home, get to see the nice cutscenes we do and then speak into the mic. They go to a studio, someone there gives them the script and tells them how to read it. 99% of the time they don't even get any context of the spoken lines or any visual aid.

Yes, that does not excuse bad voice acting. But most of the time it's also the fault of the director. But people only ever blame the voice actor.

And in this case, it's always while mentioning that Wuk Lamat's voice actor is trans.

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Because wuk lamat is central to the story and talks more than anyone else this expansion. SHe has the most lines in the entire DT story
Erenville barely talks and doesn't really have scenes where he needs to be emotional so his acting is not noticeable

I wish Samantha Béart voiced Wuk Lamat for the EN part, alas..

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Originally Posted by Plushy

It's like they didn't even care.
First...the "protagonist" of Dawntrail Wuk Lamat. Flat delivery, no range of emotions, monotone as hell, extremely amateur.
The fact SE hired this clearly B grade VA for important role like this just shows a extreme lack of care for English speakers...everybody has to start somewhere but who at SE heard her delivery for the final boss and thought "yeah this is banger, ship it".
I found out this VA is part of the LGBT community so it's little wonder she has so much defenders..I'm sorry but I just can't help but realize how disingenuous it is...
Just because she's trans doesn't mean she can't receive criticism, stop defending her and pretending she did good just because what she identifies as.
In the western community, being trans is the ultimate shield from criticism and I'm sick of it.
I'm probably going to get called transphobic now but I have tons of trans friends in school and in-game so you can miss me with that crap so don't even try.

I'm not sure if the voice director is to blame here or just purely the voice actors.
Even main stays didn't sound like themselves, everybody sounded bored and recording from a bad mic.

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The Voidcast Cringe (Ultimate)

You not transphobe but have been dodging saying "voice actress" for all the post. You had no trouble writing it when it came to writing "voice actors". ROFL

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Originally Posted by R1V3N

You not transphobe but have been dodging saying "voice actress" for all the post. You had no trouble writing it when it came to writing "voice actors". ROFL

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I thought the world was trying to get rid of gendered language, yet here you are promoting it.

Not really a need to bring up that the VA is trans whether you support or not. I personally loved ARR voice acting when I first played during 2.0, discovered I was apparently a minority in that situation. I didn't care for the voicr acting but barely thought of it as the worst. Don't expect a Japanese game company to ever cater to countries outside their main market.

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Originally Posted by R1V3N

You not transphobe but have been dodging saying "voice actress" for all the post. You had no trouble writing it when it came to writing "voice actors". ROFL

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Actor and Actress can be used interchangeably, this is a non issue.

The VA is not a good VA, voicework-wise and personality wise. People are being called Transphobic for not liking her voice, but here you have her being straight up misognystic against the women of the American Voice Acting industry. Her Twitter/X posts are all just that, being trans and often hating cis-gendered people, but mainly women. If she weren't trans, you can straight up call her an Incel, but you can't because she's protected by that.

Many people find her voice bad, that's just how they see it. If you like it then you like it but can't go not criticizing when the screams are not there, or the voice is flat/monotone.

Sena being trans doesn't mean she is immune to criticism, when we've always had people of any gender voice all types of characters in anime and games. People call out bad voice acting, we've always had. We called out Chaos Wars for the terrible voice crew who were pretty much mostly Nepotism hire because the voice director brought in family. We called out Arc Rise Fantasia for the bad voice work too, but looking back ARF has better voice actors who can raise their voice and not have one tone unlike Wuk Lamat/Sena.

People always just jump straight to Transphobia, but never address any of the other issues. When they say they like the voice, that's all. We never get an explanation. Argue your point. The other side gives videos, instances, of the bad voice acting over and over again but it's always ignored.

https://i.imgur.com/T5K5GGJ.png

I just want to make a quick chime that the German dubbed absolutely destroyed us in terms of talent and direction. The fact the German script is more a literal translation from the JP script really makes me wonder what else they enshittified for us English speakers.

I barely know any German other than words that sound like English, and even I can pick up more words being spoken that is not in the script.

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Originally Posted by ViaDesperare

The VA is not a good VA, voicework-wise and personality wise. People are being called Transphobic for not liking her voice, but here you have her being straight up misognystic against the women of the American Voice Acting industry. Her Twitter/X posts are all just that, being trans and often hating cis-gendered people, but mainly women. If she weren't trans, you can straight up call her an Incel, but you can't because she's protected by that.

Many people find her voice bad, that's just how they see it. If you like it then you like it but can't go not criticizing when the screams are not there, or the voice is flat/monotone.

Sena being trans doesn't mean she is immune to criticism, when we've always had people of any gender voice all types of characters in anime and games. People call out bad voice acting, we've always had. We called out Chaos Wars for the terrible voice crew who were pretty much mostly Nepotism hire because the voice director brought in family. We called out Arc Rise Fantasia for the bad voice work too, but looking back ARF has better voice actors who can raise their voice and not have one tone unlike Wuk Lamat/Sena.

People always just jump straight to Transphobia, but never address any of the other issues. When they say they like the voice, that's all. We never get an explanation. Argue your point. The other side gives videos, instances, of the bad voice acting over and over again but it's always ignored.

https://i.imgur.com/T5K5GGJ.png

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...did you even read and understand the Tweets you included in your message? She is saying that boys in anime are quite often voiced by female voice actors, which is true, and then stating that if cross-gender voice acting is okay for them, then why is it not the other way around?

You see a request for equal treatment, one in which they actually kind of have a point, and you call it misogyny?

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Originally Posted by Ratikal

I just want to make a quick chime that the German dubbed absolutely destroyed us in terms of talent and direction. The fact the German script is more a literal translation from the JP script really makes me wonder what else they enshittified for us English speakers.

I barely know any German other than words that sound like English, and even I can pick up more words being spoken that is not in the script.

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Um.. the German forum is also hating on Wuk Lamat though..? I don't think it is the voicing.

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Originally Posted by Eyrilona

Um.. the German forum is also hating on Wuk Lamat though..? I don't think it is the voicing.

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I did the last trail with all the languages. While the delivery was def better for some of them, all still felt somewhat hollow during the last part of the fight.

So yeah, it's primarily a writing issue across the board.

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Originally Posted by Eyrilona

Um.. the German forum is also hating on Wuk Lamat though..? I don't think it is the voicing.

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Where did I mention Wuk Lamat anywhere in my post?

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Originally Posted by R1V3N

You not transphobe but have been dodging saying "voice actress" for all the post. You had no trouble writing it when it came to writing "voice actors". ROFL

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Voice actors rolls off the tongue better than voice actress'
i never say voice actress myself, no matter the gender

I liked Wuk Lamat's voicing. Definitely not monotonous to me, there was always an emotion in their tone and their inflections were well done.
I DID think the voicing in the last part of the last trial fell flat to me, but I'm not sure if that's Sena or the audio controls; her voice didn't seem appropriately tuned to the battle environment - it was like being in a movie then suddenly a spoken line comes from behind you irl. It was a jarring delivery.

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Originally Posted by Ratikal

Where did I mention Wuk Lamat anywhere in my post?

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You did not, it is just that your message was in a flow of messages in this thread that rather focused on that particular character. I will yield to you on this one though. :)

Despite this thread being pure bait, I'm going to respond with a real answer.

The localization lead was responsible for hiring all of the main voice actors. She was behind the decision to cast accurate voice actors and portray lore correspondingly.

However, the actress for Wuk Lamat was not cast similarly. This is her first role as a Latin-coded character. In addition, she does not have a native accent. The faking of an ethnic accent by a White person should be reprehensible in 2024. How was this missed? And given that the localization lead had "trouble casting" Koana, was the same not for Wuk? What exactly went on here?

For those who don't think this is an issue: you will hear this every time you run the third trial (spoilers). Even ordinary people have commented on it. I'm not sure why Naoki Yoshida is so careless, unless he just thinks that the English translation is only there to be serviceable and nothing more. But given that his tenure on the board of directors has been a disaster for the company, I'm not surprised.