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

[MikkoAkure]

I would assume they should have the budget for good voice actors.

I believe all the voice actors or at least a giant margin of them were all supposed to be from the same London VA studio so I wonder if there's some sort of guild reason they can't hire more known names. ARR had known VAs like Gideon Emery voicing Urianger (he also voiced Balthier), Talesin Jaffe as Thancred, Sam Riegal as Alphinaud. They were all replaced in HW and beyond with a whole other studio.

But it's not that they were all completely let go either because Jason Miller who voiced Raubahn in ARR came back as a singer in ShB so that makes me feel more like there's a reason they're not allowed to have certain people as VAs and need to hire from a pool.

I think there's been a drop in quality since the EW patches, and it has gotten to the point where people in my FC thought that Thancred was being voiced by a different actor. I'm not sure if it's recording equipment, voice direction, or both. I don't think the localizers have anything to do with it, but the direction seems to be lacking and it's often very apparent that they're not in the same studio together to play off each other.


As far as Genshin goes, while a lot of the VA work is really good, the quality in some places has taken a hit, especially with the recordings of certain characters. Some VAs in Genshin have a noticeable hissing noise on their S sounds due to what I can guess is their home recording equipment. I wonder if a lot of western VAs record at home while Japanese VAs are more likely to record in a studio.

I don't want to hate on Erenville's English VA but I was quite surprised by their casting decision (in Endwalker already) because his voice/characterisation of Erenville is so different from the Japanese one. They almost feel like different characters in a sense?
I agree that some deliveries are definitely sub-optimal though.

One thing I don't think a lot of people bring up when criticizing Wuk Lamat's "fake" South American accent is that Erenville is supposed to be from the some place, but he speaks with an Icelandic accent and is voiced by an Icelandic actor. All of the other Viera from his same village are voiced by Americans with American accents. The meta answer is probably that they didn't anticipate him being Turali or coming back later when he was first written and in English up until now it had been a tradition for Viera to be Icelandic, but it's still a little incongruous. As for Wuk Lamat herself, all the accents of the region seem to be all over the place including the members of her own family that she spends all her time with so I'm not sure what she's supposed to sound like.

Either way, I think mediocre voice acting that actually has accents instead of all the same Tokyo-regional proper Japanese is more interesting anyhow. Plus I actually understand English and can follow along without overtaking the scene while reading when the voice actor hasn't gotten to that part yet.

I don't think the Japanese version is faultless either. Yuyuhase's Japanese VA doesn't seem to have known the actual character he was supposed to be voicing except that he was bad, so that voice somehow became a Lalafell voice.