So... Merlwyb will be voiced

[Abriael]

I don't mind the choices, and to each his own of course, but those that hold Japanese to some high pedestal really need to examine just why they have a weeabo fascination with it.

Or maybe some (that have actually worked in the voice acting industry) know how to distinguish good voice acting from mediocre voice acting, and recognize that Japan simply has a much more solid tradition for voice overs that the US and Britain do, resulting in much higher quality overall.

Why not praise the upcoming French or German voice overs? What's that? You don't speak those languages, so you don't care? Alright, I can accept the indifference.

Having worked with voice acting in French and German as well (as several of the DVD productions I worked on were tri-lingual for the continental European market), there isn't much praise to be done towards the voice acting efforts normally done in those countries. They have a very strong subtitling tradition, that in turn prevented them from developing an equally strong voice acting school.

Maybe you should just realize that there are *objective* reasons why Japanese (or Italian for instance) voice overs are in general superior to American, British, German or French ones.

When it comes to art (and voice acting is an art) tradition plays a big role, and Japan has a much more solid tradition than the other countries mentioned. Conversely, they have a weaker tradition in live movie/TV acting than the US (for instance) and for the same reasons it shows.

On top of that there's an enormous difference in average budgets and in timings for voice acting (the time allocated to try each line is very important to final quality, and it's directly related to budget), as its given culturally a different importance, contributing to a large difference in technical quality.

There's also another important factor related to video games. In Japan voice acting video games (and anime) isn't seen as a secondary or less important job as it is in the west. When you check the cast of the average game in Japan you'll find a lot of star-level actors in it, because doing voice over for games (or anime) is considered a top-tier job that star-level actors don't shun.

In the west most star-level actors consider working on games beneath their level, so they won't do it, or will require a steep budget increase, which is why in 99.99% of cases when a Japanese game comes to the west star-level actors with a massive experience that acted in the original are replaced with mediocre actors or inexperienced ones at the beginning of their career, resulting in an evident decrease in quality.

Before you go ahead and call it "weaboo!", you may as well realize that you're being much more irrational than the average "weaboo".

For the record, I thought the 1.0 voice acting was done very well. The only two problems I had were the faux-Brit accents (Crispin Freeman/Thancred, looking at you >_>) and the forced cracky lalafell voices of Papalymo and the miner twins. Mind you, the acting itself was great, just not the cracky falsetto-like tone XD

Apologies if this is all over the place, typing from phone. x.x

The English voice acting of 1.0 was rather sloppy, with intentions and accents all over the place. Most probably it was rushed.