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

[ZodaSoda]

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.

If SE still thinks NA is too stupid to have aga spells, thats a problem of the inhouse Localizers

[Souljacker]

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

Fair enough, but I think y'all need to focus on her performance if you want to criticize her performance. Folks are allowed to have opinions and there's some validity to wanting a character that's portrayed as representative of your identity being voiced by someone who brings authenticity to that identity. I get it. I may be of the mind that ANY representation is better than what we all had before and accept them as the good faith gestures I believe they are, but being a cis woman who's been relegated to the back seat for so long I guess I have been conditioned to have a less strong opinion about stuff like that anyway. And it has nothing at all to do with Wuk Lamat or this glaringly bad xpac.

If SE still thinks NA is too stupid to have aga spells, thats a problem of the inhouse Localizers

Can't divorce them from the company. It's insulting they thought folks new to FF couldn't read a tooltip, instead they made everyone who already HAD been playing FF for their entire lives reacclimate to this silliness. It's an example of how little they think about us that SE didn't take a stand on it and let them basically shit all over 30+ years of lore.

Yea, that makes me salty.

[GrizzlyTank]

Unfortunately, it was clear that the VA was already straining her voice when Wuk was talking normally. Which resulted in her not having enough range to properly manage other tones resulting in most yelling scenes sounding incredibly flat.

Though some of it should have also been amended in post-production.

It's kind of like Eric Carman from south park. Originally Trey Parker was voicing Eric completely on his own, but it ended up straining his throat too much that they had to change it to a more normal voice during production and then changing the lines in post-prod.

[Reimmi]

So, there always were bad performances of voice acting in this game. Why do we now get multiple threads about this issue?

Also, do people here know how voice acting even works? Voice actors don't sit at home, get to see the nice cutscenes we do and then speak into the mic. They go to a studio, someone there gives them the script and tells them how to read it. 99% of the time they don't even get any context of the spoken lines or any visual aid.

Yes, that does not excuse bad voice acting. But most of the time it's also the fault of the director. But people only ever blame the voice actor.

And in this case, it's always while mentioning that Wuk Lamat's voice actor is trans.

Because wuk lamat is central to the story and talks more than anyone else this expansion. SHe has the most lines in the entire DT story
Erenville barely talks and doesn't really have scenes where he needs to be emotional so his acting is not noticeable

[Kohashi]

I wish Samantha Béart voiced Wuk Lamat for the EN part, alas..

[Artina-EU-PH]

It's like they didn't even care.
First...the "protagonist" of Dawntrail Wuk Lamat. Flat delivery, no range of emotions, monotone as hell, extremely amateur.
The fact SE hired this clearly B grade VA for important role like this just shows a extreme lack of care for English speakers...everybody has to start somewhere but who at SE heard her delivery for the final boss and thought "yeah this is banger, ship it".
I found out this VA is part of the LGBT community so it's little wonder she has so much defenders..I'm sorry but I just can't help but realize how disingenuous it is...
Just because she's trans doesn't mean she can't receive criticism, stop defending her and pretending she did good just because what she identifies as.
In the western community, being trans is the ultimate shield from criticism and I'm sick of it.
I'm probably going to get called transphobic now but I have tons of trans friends in school and in-game so you can miss me with that crap so don't even try.

I'm not sure if the voice director is to blame here or just purely the voice actors.
Even main stays didn't sound like themselves, everybody sounded bored and recording from a bad mic.

[...]

The Voidcast Cringe (Ultimate)

[R1V3N]

You not transphobe but have been dodging saying "voice actress" for all the post. You had no trouble writing it when it came to writing "voice actors". ROFL

[Aulainn]

You not transphobe but have been dodging saying "voice actress" for all the post. You had no trouble writing it when it came to writing "voice actors". ROFL

I thought the world was trying to get rid of gendered language, yet here you are promoting it.

[DeathNoodles]

Not really a need to bring up that the VA is trans whether you support or not. I personally loved ARR voice acting when I first played during 2.0, discovered I was apparently a minority in that situation. I didn't care for the voicr acting but barely thought of it as the worst. Don't expect a Japanese game company to ever cater to countries outside their main market.

[IvoryHawk]

You not transphobe but have been dodging saying "voice actress" for all the post. You had no trouble writing it when it came to writing "voice actors". ROFL

Actor and Actress can be used interchangeably, this is a non issue.