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

[lolnotacat]

And the actor's gender does not matter in the slightest here.

To be fair, it matters to Wuk's VA.

[Kohashi]

I did the entire DT expansion with JP voices and while I was watching some streams with the EN variant I was shocked at how different it sounded, especially Erenville and Wuk Lamat.

Frankly, I sway much more toward faulty directing than VA per se. It's their responsibility to make sure the scenes and the energy are matched and it sounded like it didn't. JP VA for Wuk Lamat was absolutely outstanding and the directing for everyone was just 10/10.

[Turnintino]

Exactly what i was getting at yeah, there was even a video recently of all the new cast on the Alphinaud channel with all the VA cast, everyone but Sena actually sounds like their character, so why go with someone that has to make the accent

To be fair, the vast majority of the Turali cast is faking their (Mexican) Spanish-American accent, and in the casting department's defense, you can only really reasonably ask for a certain accent on the call sheet -- not that it necessarily be genuine. Although it seems clear, based on what what we currently know, that they did go out of their way to cast Latino actors as well.

I'm of two minds on the accent thing anyway, because while it's true that some sound silly or borderline offensive, I also think it's true that actors, whose first language actually isn't English, can sometimes give strange and stilted performances. Case in point: Erenville's actor, who (I can tell by some of his very weird line readings) didn't always quite grasp what he was saying. But that's as much on his director as any other of these performances.

[Sacae]

I thought the voice acting was pretty good by FFXIV standards. Wuk Lamat was kinda meh at some points, but I really enjoyed both of the two-headed Mamool Ja, Erenville's mom, and Koana. Sphene was good as well.

[Fawkes]

I thought the voice acting was pretty good by FFXIV standards. Wuk Lamat was kinda meh at some points, but I really enjoyed both of the two-headed Mamool Ja, Erenville's mom, and Koana. Sphene was good as well.

Also that one guy in the cowboy zone that sounded like Sam Elliott.

[AddictedToWitches]

Sena's performance just sucks and judging by her tweets, she is incapable of taking criticism and blames her lack of roles on her being trans rather than due to her skill.
I implore anyone who believes it's purely a voice direction issue to look at her previous work.
I dunno how she managed to land the role of Wuk Lamat at all, but I doubt anything at all would ever be said or done about it

[ShariusTC]

To be fair, it matters to Wuk's VA.

tbf, not everyone use english VA so don't include VA gendre in character discussion

[KisaiTenshi]

Are people not allowed to like Wuk Lamaty? I do at least. Lucky not everyone is the same or it would all be boring.
Also this is plain criticism which is everyone s right to have but to call it "valid" criticism is trying to make it more important then it is, just a personal opinion.

The problem is people are being extremely rude about it. That's what got previous threads deleted.

It is fine to criticize the acting. Not the Actor. The minute someone points to anything about the actor that isn't in-game, they're basically hating the "choice of actor for some reason that has nothing to do with the game."

There are at least two other voice actors in game, who's studio recordings are of a vastly different quality than everyone elses, so they stick out. That is not Square-Enix's fault. That is the studio who did the recordings.

Voice direction is also going to be the studio's fault. We do not know much about this, and it ultimately only matters a small amount, since the game is written in Japanese first, not English. So we can only ever expect the best-effort localization and voice acting based on it. There are clearly some lines that Wuk Lamat's voice actor failed to deliver, probably from inexperience, but I felt more of that writing in general.

Like overall, I give the writing a C+ during the 7 mcguffins, and a B for everything after in the MSQ. It almost feels like everything from before the train ride was written to support what came after. Like Wuk Lamat is not alone in some strange voice deliveries, again, mostly in the 7 Mcguffins. I suspect there was some penny pinching going on with the voice over budget, because it seems like far more scenes are unvoiced, yet seemingly important, for no other reason than there are too many people in them.

[Souljacker]

Y'all love dragging out that quote. Has nothing to do with the performance. She's no worse than the other terrible VA we have in this game, SE frankly just doesn't want to hire top talent. And I know they could afford it.

Or maybe they are too hard to work with and folks like Jennifer Hale turn down the roles. Who knows. But the fixation on this particular actress's personal life and opinions is over the top. Let's discuss how bad this xpac OVERALL just is. Writing, direction, all of it, it's just bad, more of the same, treadmill, dull. There is nothing new or exciting and that just exacerbates everything else.

I think that folks don't appreciate how difficult it can be to bring life to a character that is already written with a terrible identity. The traits the author intended to be endearing are instead obnoxious, they can't seem to decide on an accent for the folks in this region (or ANY region, for that matter), and the overall missing identity of the game in general all makes the VA feel worse than objectively it is. She's articulate, it's not nails on a chalkboard, we just have a real deep-seated problem with the way they constructed this xpac overall that I'm not sure even an actress like Jennifer Hale could have carried it. This is a HEAVY lift.

Is Wuk Lamat's VA great? No, she didn't knock it out of the park. But neither is she as bad as some of you are intent on saying she is. A lot of it is direction - the slow, halting way most of the characters speak because that's how JP think Americans actually communicate is 100% direction. I end up skipping many cutscenes because I've read the text and the character hasn't gotten past the first half-sentence. No VA can overcome that and while maybe I'd let it play just to hear Keith David talk, it's just another reminder that SE literally thinks NA is too stupid to have things like -aga spells. Or normal conversations.

[Karious]

Nah she wants to talk shit publicly, that conversation is our business especially since she's the face of the expansion