What are your thoughts on the voice acting?

[FJerome]

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.

[Autumnfire]

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?

[FritoBandito]

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.

[Fluttersnipe]

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.

[Aegis]

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.

[Kyana]

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 ^^

[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?

[Aegis]

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?

[Mysteltain]

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.

[Velhart]

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.