Voice Acting in HW. I forgot...

[Colorful]

After playing a bit of Fallout 4 these English voices are incredibly disappointing. Obviously it's a given that a multibillion dollar company with a game that's going to raking in more billions is going to have better voice acting, but can't FFXIV hire, I don't know, somewhat decent actors? Ones that put emotion into their voices, like they're actually acting? Given how rare voice acting is in this game, I'd expect it to be of a higher quality, not that I'd want more of the scenes to be VA's with these actors. The disparity is jarring, one moment you have a decent VA (Alphinaud) and the other you have an awful voice actor (Y'shtola, Yugiri, Illberd, etc). I will say though, the voice acting of Heavensward is, for the most part, significantly better than that of ARR. I had to switch to JP voices because of how awful they were, and that's not something I enjoy doing.

[KeluBehemoth]

Unfortunately there are a great deal of "Voice Actors" who only voice act because they weren't good enough actors to get a normal acting gig.

Far too many Voice Actors will literally just stand in the recording booth and blithely read the lines off a piece of paper with zero interaction with the scene for which they voicing.

That's not to say that ALL of them do that, There are quite a few really good english Voice Actors, ones who 'act' the part of the character they're trying to be the voice of. Watch a video of the some good Voice Actors going about their recordings and you'll see what i mean.

Exactly.

There's voicing in HW but you can tell there's no "acting" behind it. I've seen VAs in the studio.

[Kikoten]

I personally liked Lahabrea's new voice. He was fucking intense during that fight. He shouted some of my favorite war cries in FF14 to date, including "Know your place!", "Your quest ends here!" and "You'll not defeat me again!"

The way the actor delivered those lines made it feel like Lahabrea was actually straining himself to fight you, while 99% of the time it's you who find battles like that extremely ardurous, storywise. Lahabrea's girlfriend, on the other hand (if one could call her that), sounded like she was the cool-headed one... probably because that was her first time facing you, so she hadn't yet experienced the epic Warrior-of-Light asskicking Lahabrea got for the second time in 3.0.

[Xanikk999]

Funny you should say that. Just today, after actually finishing that quest, I switched to English and re-watched Krile's entry. And ... I wish I hadn't done that. x_x But I was simply curious, just wanted to hear what the English voices are like for a change. It literally made me shiver. For me, it's that what kills immersion, not the Japanese - and I don't speak Japanese. I dunno, I usually don't have any problem with English voices in English games, but here it's just way too weird and foreign to me, not to mention much worse too in my opinion.

So you don't speak Japanese but you prefer Japanese voice overs? I will never understand this phenomenon among the anime community. It reeks of japonophilia. I would rather turn the sound OFF then listen to something I can't understand. The English isn't so bad that it would make me want to listen to Gibberish instead.

[MeeDeggiThePunisher]

So you don't speak Japanese but you prefer Japanese voice overs? I will never understand this phenomenon among the anime community. It reeks of japonophilia.

I prefer all foreign media in it's original language, that doesn't make me a frenchaboo for watching a french film. But when applied to japanese things you get labeled a japanophile/weeaboo usually by some who enjoys anime. That is the more mysterious phenomenon.

[CyrilLucifer]

snip

Well, given that Igeyorhm is the ice-based one of the two, you'll have to forgive the pun, but she most definitely probably was the cooler-headed one.

Maybe it's just me not being terribly fond of Scottish accents, but I felt it didn't fit on Lahabrea at all. Alec Newman's a fine actor, though.

PS: Lahabrea has the best lines, no exception.

[Xanikk999]

I prefer all foreign media in it's original language, that doesn't make me a frenchaboo for watching a french film. But when applied to japanese things you get labeled a japanophile/weeaboo usually by some who enjoys anime. That is the more mysterious phenomenon.

Ok fair enough. It doesn't make sense to me though. I could understand if you knew the language but whatever.

[RyuRoots]

So you don't speak Japanese but you prefer Japanese voice overs? I will never understand this phenomenon among the anime community. It reeks of japonophilia. I would rather turn the sound OFF then listen to something I can't understand. The English isn't so bad that it would make me want to listen to Gibberish instead.

Yeah, how unnatural to want to see a work in the language it was created in rather than adapted into. Only anime fans have ever been like this in the history of entertainment. I think it's amazing anyone is actually obtuse enough to make that presumption.

[DragonSlayer45]

Raubahns voice pre HW was SO strong! Alphinaud had character! They sounded unique.

I disagree. Honestly, Raubahn sounded very unnatural. Its as if the voice actor was trying to be gruff while maintaining an accent and it came off as very awkward. His HW voice is much more natural, although that might be due to his VA actually being British this time. You have me at Alphinaud, but I think both are good. I feel like the new voice fits his character development a bit more, as his pre HW voice was good for his character at the time: A naive, and a bit snide, character.

The only voices I really wish they didn't change were Urianger's and Merlwyb's.

[Lambdafish]

I'm on the fence with this issue, while a few of the changes are bad (Gideon emery why???) I love some of the new voice acting. I actually really liked aphinaud's new voice, before he struck me as unlikable and stuck up, which I guess is what his character was supposed to be, then he got fleshed out more in HW and we now see that he is actually just a kid waay out of his depth (this was shown massively in 3.1), and his voice actor change is very fitting for this new characterisation of childlike and naive.

Also matoya's voice acting is spot on, it always excites me to hear more sass from the grumpy old woman.