Cid sounds like a pirate now

[gilmorej]

Yeah I generally like the VA in this game but when Cid started talking in that cutscene I remember thinking to myself "this sounds really bad, this doesn't sound like a professional doing a serious voice"

[Canadane]

This is why I enjoy Japanese voice acting standards. You generally get the same actor for the character for rest of time.

[Enla]

This is why I enjoy Japanese voice acting standards. You generally get the same actor for the character for rest of time.

Soken addressed this awhile back.

GE: The voice acting in Heavensward… I noticed a lot of NPCs have different voices now and I was wondering why those changes were made?

S: It’s a tough question to answer. When we’re thinking of the business of an MMORPG we would love to use the same voice actor throughout the series, but there are contractual obligations and sometimes it doesn’t allow for us to buy the rights to their voice for a perpetual amount of times. Sometimes there are other reasons that might come up and so we would have to sometimes recast the actors that are voicing our NPCs. Our intent is that we want to avoid having to recast them.

This might be because it’s a long running game, it might be out of the ordinary, but if a voice actor decides to leave the industry, it would be inevitable that we would have to recast them.

There are instances where within the development process that we would have to recast and have new actors record voices for certain NPCs. Our stance however is that we’d love to keep as many of them as possible from 2.0 moving forward, continuing to reprise their roles in upcoming expansions and the updates throughout.

Sometimes due to business reasons we have to change the voice actors. From the creative side of things however we want to keep them, it’s not a situation where we don’t like them or anything like that.

My honest guess? Something happened on the contractual side of things. Either they couldn't keep paying for the VA's they had, because if you look at the names some of them are VERY big names, and had to switch studios. An unlikely scenario is that they had to switch recording studios due to moving their sound team to a different state but SE isn't the NA Anime Industry where that is actually a concern due to VA companies being primarily congregated in like three states, so I doubt that's what happened.

[Canadane]

Yeah that's exactly why I said I prefer the Japanese standards.
You don't see things like that happening very often.

[Soge01]

Yeah that's exactly why I said I prefer the Japanese standards.
You don't see things like that happening very often.

I'm sort of the same way. The Japanese VAs of most most games and anime a far, far, far better than their english counterparts. I only listen to FFXIV's english VAs because I'm just used to it and don't feel like transitioning. Plus they're actually quite decent compared to other english VAs. Especially the anime ones who all tend to sound the same with little to no effort put in their acting.

[Lanadra]

This is why I enjoy Japanese voice acting standards. You generally get the same actor for the character for rest of time.

Exactly why I stick to JP audio also. Consistency.

Well, that and the fact that a good few of my favorite Japanese seiyuu's voice characters in this game.

[MikkoAkure]

The reason for the English VA change from ARR to HW is because of contracts. The original studio was in Los Angeles then it changed to a voice acting studio located in the United Kingdom. So funny enough all the accents are genuine now. For Cid, his HW and onward VA is from Bristol, which has the same accent that the "pirate accent" originated from.

As far as preferring one language over the other, my friends who speak Japanese as a first language said that the Japanese voice acting can be really bad and over the top or just plain wrong a lot of the time. Some of it is really good but a lot of it the voice actors just go full ham and the difference in quality in the same scene is distracting. Everyone has the same flat accent and it’s not like the English version where you can tell which country some of the characters are from based on their accent.

I think it’s one of those cases where if you don’t know the language, you can’t tell how bad it is lol.

[Jin-]

Video please

[Soge01]

Video please

Skip to 1:05:10

[Shibi]

Yeah that's exactly why I said I prefer the Japanese standards.
You don't see things like that happening very often.

Me too, and of course, for people who know Japanese, there is a whole different story in some places. Significantly different to the janky English audio.