Lip Sync

[Calis]

Uh... You guys should've noticed this, but in most cutscenes, they use pre-baked animation and blend them together. Most animations are actually taken straight from the emote list. I wouldn't be surprised if they had pre-baked lip flaps, and slap them there just the same. Why? Budget reasons. It would cost them a lot more money (or time) to use fresh animation to every cutscene.

Pre-bake is like, reusing animation keyframes that had been used in other shots or from a pool of pre-existing animation takes (motion capture data, or hand keyed) like those from the emote list or character attack moves in battle.

Of course, there are a few instances where they animate a scene specifically from scratch. Expect those to have proper lip sync to the Japanese audio.

[Alucard135]

They're using a pretty basic lip syncing algorithm that just moves the lips in a smei random manner whenever an audio is played. This is much more budget efficient than reanimating the lips for every language. You can notice it in scenes where the character makes a scream or a laugh and they didn't use the pre-baked animation. Example of Grynewaht scream. Even the English scene has the same issue.

Is it possible to have a lip syncing algorithm that works perfectly for any language? Yes, Soul Calibur 2 has it since 2002.

English voice
Japanese voice