Why did they change all the voice actors?

[Souljacker]

I hope SE is watching this feedback closely. VA's have been a hot topic all over my server and I imagine its the same on other servers, too. Folks are generally not impressed with the changes.

[Aeyis]

English VA in this game is sweet. I wanna marry Merlwyb's VA.

I never understood people who blindly think japanese voices are good regardless of their actual quality just for the sake that it's japanese.

I'm American and I speak english, english will always be better for me.

Lol. Arent you doing the exact same thing yourself, but with english?

I personally didn't think one was any better than the other...

Except for Minfilia. I just did not like the English VA for her, and thought the Japanese VA did a much better job of conveying emotion and reactions.

Nanamo and Merlwyb's voices are awesome in Japanese. (im biased in nanamos case tho)
Overall I feel the english voices dont really match. To be fair, a large part of the reason is probably the english script they are using, not the VA's themselves.

Compare it to say FFXIII-2, I dont think I could ever play it with japanese voices, the english va is just that good (and character fitting)

[ShanaShirayuki]

It sounds like Ser Aymeric's VA (Blake Ritson) is the same, which is good.

[Inanna]

I HEAR CHANGES

DO NOT LIKE

[Magis]

It's silly. Voice is one of the key indentifiers for a character, so when you change it... the whole character changes. Whhhhhy did you change Urianger? He was sooo good. Specially after Moenbryda.

[SpiritMuse]

It's silly. Voice is one of the key indentifiers for a character, so when you change it... the whole character changes. Whhhhhy did you change Urianger? He was sooo good. Specially after Moenbryda.

Especially when the character is animated, the voice determines so much. So to change it is no trivial matter.

This is like finally getting to see the much anticipated second season of (one of) your favorite series, only to find they recast all the characters with completely different people.

[KisaiTenshi]

Gods, they didn't even try to get people that sounded the same. Some are worse then others. Cid and Alph were ok. Yuguri and Merlwyb were bad (like pulled some folks out of HR one day and said "Hey, read some lines in "X" accent" bad), and Urianger and Illberd's VOs were CRIMINAL.

I sincerely doubt that was the case.

The point in the storyline I'm at right now, Merlwyb lacks the "authority" tone that was there previously. Illberd... what... I remember him previously having something of an accent, but this seems over-the-top.

Anyhow. It would have been preferable to keep VA's unless they didn't want to continue, or scheduling conflicts. It's a MMO, they could always fix stuff like this later if called for. We shouldn't really be going "oh the voice changed, it's alright, I'll deal", we should be going "No SE, bad *hit with newspaper*" metaphorically.

I really doubt it was a cost thing.

re: other nonsense
Japanese VA's can be awful too. The difference between NA VA's and JP VA's is that American VA's are unionized. That can be a good thing or a bad thing. Outside of the US, there are similar union systems in other English-speaking countries. This is often why you hear the exact same people over and over and over again. The production is either required to hire only from the union, or they can't use anyone from the union.

In the same line of thinking, this is also why a lot of early Anime dubs were terrible. I'm not talking "passable", I'm talking about how American VA's at some point in time found it beneath them to do "anime" dubs, so a lot of productions from the 90's and early 2000's just reused as many people as possible. Where a JP production might have 30 unique voices, the NA production might have 6. When a production decides that they can not afford 30 unique voices to do a few lines, that tells you the producers think it's not going to do well.

In video games, a lot of voices often start out as people on staff, the programmers, the HR department, etc and they save their VA budget for the main character/narrator and antagonist. If there's enough VA budget left over, then they start replacing the worst voices in the game. That's why not every line is read in most video games. We have plenty of space, what we don't have are hundreds of voice actors just to to read out three quest stories. It's often preferable to remove/delete voices from a game, than publish poor quality ones.

[Adelard]

Am I the only one who prefers the new voice actors? Although I am still very early in the story, iceheart for example showed more emotion. It seemed less wooden. Anybody noticed this?

[Kaelah]

Am I the only one who prefers the new voice actors? Although I am still very early in the story, iceheart for example showed more emotion. It seemed less wooden. Anybody noticed this?

Nope, I prefer most of them too. Only one that I find truely odd is Urianger, it almost makes him feel a different character altogether to me.

[Ransu]

English voice acting tends to be treated as one-and-done or contracted for a specific period under the notion that they wouldn't be needed later. A classically bad example of this was the Dragonball/Dragonball Z series where they had around 3-4 different voices for Goku, 2-3 for Vegeta and Picollo. It's not really bad management, either. It's about predicting demand in relation to budget and contract time. Yoshida probably had the original voice actors only contracted up to the completion of all of 2.0's voiced cutscenes. You know, treating XIV like his Final Fantasy MMO. I have no doubt he tried to get his old voice actors back but they probably wanted more money so he went with someone else. Probably how we got different Gokus and Vegetas, too.

Erm.....no this is completely wrong. DBZ had so many different voices because it was dubbed by different studios over the years during the 90's. The two main ones that both completed dubbing the entire series was the ocean group which was published by pioneer and obviously funimation which pretty much everyone has had the same voice for all versions of DBZ released on tv/dvd/vhs. The only recent major change was kai where they changed some voices, but prior to that the entire series was dubbed with the same voice cast.

In the case of SE and this game....They have always half assed their voice cast and rarely put much effort into voice consistency. They could have easily built a contract to keep everyone. Hell swtor is practically a dead game and 3 years later all the original voices are still voicing their characters (excluding random NPC's obviously.)