The Voice Acting. . .

The problem with TC's argument is that these characters do have accents. They are just very subtle.

Which begs the question. What kind of accents where you expecting tc? Full on Engrish? "Ooooh, Herro worriol of right." Seems a bit culturally insensitive and a bit stereotypical to me.

You're asking too much, English is not the only language here, if they were to spend extra hiring people outside the UK to conform to different accents they would have to do the same with French, German and Japanese. This game doesn't even have full voice acting, which would be higher priority than chasing VAs with different accents through different countries through 4 different languages.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

I haven't played FFXIII so I don't know what those characters are like, but voice actors doing "Australian" accents usually sound terrible to an actual Australian.

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Which is ironic since the VA for Vanille is Australian. Fang sounds much more convincing to me and her VA is American.

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Originally Posted by Razard

The problem with TC's argument is that these characters do have accents. They are just very subtle.

Which begs the question. What kind of accents where you expecting tc? Full on Engrish? "Ooooh, Herro worriol of right." Seems a bit culturally insensitive and a bit stereotypical to me.

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Yeah, I think this is the real issue. Trying to "fake it" with accents is just going to result in something that's over-exaggerated that will probably come across as offensive to a native speaker. Trying to do something more careful/subtle is going to be hard to achieve consistently with the recordings done in spurts. So it's better, when possible, to actually hire actors that come from those cultural backgrounds and bring a natural/subtle accent to the role without being blatant. It'll probably mean that in many cases a lot of the audience won't be able to detect it, but that's okay.

As an Italian, if we ever get an "italian" region I demand everyone talks like Mario.

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Originally Posted by Nandina

And if we were to assume the Echo was a universal translator, it wouldn't explain why characters without the Echo are able to converse, despite being from foreign lands, which means that the language is the same.

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What is if the language is the same? Origin back to the alagan empire?

As I'm going through the entirety of the game again, I switched the audio to Japanese. I will say that the native tone is much, much better - though I hate that some of the dialogue said in-game doesn't match what's written in the dialogue box (looking at you, Midgard!). Characters that I absolutely hated or cringed at, I find somewhat more appealing in ARR because the Japanese audio does something that the English VAs rarely do in a lot of dubbed games/anime - properly convey tone and emotion without overdoing or underdoing it.

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Originally Posted by Nandina

Just because they're Japanese, doesn't mean their accents differ. There are plenty of Asian-Americans with typical American accents for example, so you're missing the point I'm making. Have you heard someone who's native language is Japanese speak English? While they may have proper grammar and perfect understanding of English, they don't sound like your typical American. That's what I'm referring to. Let the foreign characters sound foreign.

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umm.... what? this sounds stupid. they dont even sound american, they sound British in some, and you can tell they aren't English first. besides that japan teaches English. so this is very very very wrong. unless they pick up someone from the middle of no where in japan. or someone who refused to learn another language.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

Voice acting is a very expensive undertaking. Would it be nice to have each in-game region have a distinct accent? Sure - but it'd cost an immense amount of money, especially when you consider that they're already paying to have voice acting for many different languages.

The English voice acting improved considerably as of Heavensward and beyond. As a British guy, it's very nice to see the various different accents associated with the UK reflected in such a prominent game.

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Expensive yeah, but this is FF14 we're talking about. It's probably the second biggest MMORPG on the market. Pulling in so much money through subs alone, mog station, people still buying the game.

SWTOR is practically dead but gets pretty decent voice acting on everything. WoW for the past few years has been getting tons of cutscenes/voice acting and it's pretty good quality.

SE just lazy

The dev team doesn't seem to get a lot of money. Like after the rest of the company saw how expensive THE cs from post T12 was Yoshida got told not to make anymore like it. So while yes the game seems to rake in a lot those who hold the purse strings seem to be stingy at times.