[Feedback] Wuk Lamat's English Voice

[Dyslogic]

Yeah, EN VA has Low energy, flat and unmatched acting. Either give better direction or cast someone who matches better the character.

[Len]

For me, it's the fact that I both don't like Wuk Lamat's characterization AND the flat, strained delivery by the English voice actor makes me not want to see or hear from this character post-Dawntrail.

[Eeeeveeeeeeee]

It's not only bad voice acting, it is insulting. I literally turned the game off when she started talking about tacos and didn't come back for days. Imagine a character with a fake Chinese accent talking about egg rolls or a fake black accent talking about how much they like fried chicken. It felt like I was being mocked.

Wuk Lamat's VA is literally Hispanic...

[CoDeWa]

They've changed up voice actors in the past so no saying they won't do it. Honestly I think a lot of players would be willing to start a go fund me for a random female in the forums to replace Wuk at this point.

[Oizen]

Honey B Lovely for Dawnservant

[Boblawblah]

Honestly I think a lot of players would be willing to start a go fund me for a random female in the forums to replace Wuk at this point.

Yea, let's definitely start a gofundme for a raendom female on the forums. Nominations?

[Folsom]

Wuk Lamat's VA is literally Hispanic...

Being Hispanic does not magically give you an accent or the ability to successfully perform other accents. Just ask any person from Idaho trying to speak with a Boston accent.

Try harder.

[Turtledeluxe]

Being Hispanic does not magically give you an accent or the ability to successfully perform other accents. Just ask any person from Idaho trying to speak with a Boston accent.

Try harder.

I can confirm I've heard Sena's real voice, about five minutes ago, and the accent is totally fake. As someone who thinks the performance itself is on par with most VA in XIV, I still find it a bit upsetting they hired someone to fake an accent. I understand the VA is Hispanic and were probably inspired by family or something, so it's not the absolute worst case, but it's still kinda cringe.

Didn't the team like..pledge not to do this exact thing??

[BigBoom550]

Case in point: I know a man who's father is Mexican. He was born and raised in the northern United States, and doesn't describe himself as remotely Mexican beyond his name and heritage. I know of a girl who was born to Chinese parents, but adopted as an infant and subsequently raised in the US to parents whose knowledge of 'China' is more complete when it comes to dishware than the nation. Her knowledge of 'Chinese' is the menu.

This idea that she's immune to criticism just because of a purely incidental factor is... weak. In fact, the fact she has to put on some sort of accent would itself be a solid argument that she has limited experience with the culture and is likely an outsider to it, I.E. a foreigner.

And, as I just covered, you can have ethnic heritage from another culture without being a member. I know where my family name comes from, there's people still living there with it, but if I showed up and started acting like I'm part of their clan just because of the name I'd take a bottle to the noggin, minimum. It's been over two centuries since my family line was part of theirs, it would be absurd to act like I'm part of their culture.

So who am I to take as a greater 'authority' is the question: someone who might actually live in Latin America or the mesoamerican regions, or someone whose name is Anglo-Germanic but has some Latin American heritage?

And that's not to say there's anything wrong with reconnecting with your heritage. That's perfectly fine. To use my own examples, that friend whose father is Mexican has been to Mexico, has met his extended Mexican family. My own father went to where our name comes from. You can still reconnect with your heritage, and that's a wonderful thing to do, but it does not make you a member of the culture. It makes you a tourist.

I've got criticisms of the story as a whole that feed into Wuk Lamat a little, but it wouldn't be fair as an article of criticism because it's more pervasive and encompassing, Wuk Lamat's VA is just one head of that proverbial hydra.

[Folsom]

I can confirm I've heard Sena's real voice, about five minutes ago, and the accent is totally fake. As someone who thinks the performance itself is on par with most VA in XIV, I still find it a bit upsetting they hired someone to fake an accent. I understand the VA is Hispanic and were probably inspired by family or something, so it's not the absolute worst case, but it's still kinda cringe.

Didn't the team like..pledge not to do this exact thing??

Exactly. They managed to cast someone who made Gulool Ja Ja sound authentically Central American, with the aspiration of the s on point. But for some reason Wuk Lamat sounds like a someone doing a parody of a Spanish accent, exaggerated and inconsistent. It wouldn't be as bad if she were a side character, or if she were doing an accent she could actually perform, but she's the primary character. It's like SE's English voice casting team just gave up and said, "eh, this will have to do." Or, as someone said, connections with other staff might be a good explanation.

Tangent, and mostly an irrelevant nitpick: Accents don't make sense in Final Fantasy XIV. To have a Spanish accent, someone has to have either spoken or been around people who speak Spanish; similarly with Hindi. But no one speaks Spanish in Tuliyollal; not even the crowd mumbles are in Spanish. Everyone speaks fluent Eorzean--and I mean fluent, first language, "I was educated at the Studium" Eorzean, minus the occasional Limsan pirate or brigand. You can walk up to a random NPC who lives in the wilds and has clearly never even been to major city, and there's no dialectical or educational variation outside of very specific characters, which results in everyone sounding exactly the same in text, and often in voiced speech as well.