[Feedback] Wuk Lamat's English Voice

[Lieri]

Anyone who publicly tweets about their hatred towards certain groups, or anything controversial isnt really a person I can trust/respect. And as we have seen with WoW, it can easily snowball into other things and ruin the fun for so many people (players mainly).

I hope SE realizes XIV is still their golden child. Better learn from Blizzard.

[Lusarae]

This was a miscast. I don't even know or care what region anyone hiring is from. Please by all means hire Americans. But hire talented ones. If you want diversity well this also would have been a great opportunity to be diverse and inclusive with the cast, by getting a native latina to voice act Wuk Lamat. We got neither. Which is very strange since this character got like 90% of all the voiced lines this expansion. Most of the other amateur voice acting in this game doesn't have as gigantic of a spotlight on them.

[Vahlnir]

If you want diversity well this also would have been a great opportunity to be diverse and inclusive with the cast, by getting a native latina to voice act Wuk Lamat.

I think this would have been the best approach and it would have made way more sense. Don't get me wrong, I don't think Wuk's VA was the absolute worst, but she probably needed a smaller role first before being given a big one like this. And she obviously needed better direction from whoever was in charge of that because, quite frankly, it doesn't feel like they really cared. They probably just said "say these lines" and didn't bother to try and refine them.

[Derio]

Im American and I agree that the VA was really bad. But its not just the VA. Its the writing. Not sure if the VA recording was not done in a studio but it doesnt sound like director helped them at all or anyone assisted them with the lines.

Several lines feel very flat, dull with no emotion. The upcoming patches the VA needs coaching and support to deliver better lines. However if the VA was better it still wouldnt improve the very bad writing and pacing. Nor would it fix the final boss encounter.

[seolhyun]

someone told me wuk is supposed to be a young teenager and i didnt even know. i thought she looked and sounded like 40 or something which made alot of her scenes weird and cringy. maybe if she had a young VA the naruto type personality would have worked better.

[Carolingian]

This thread is a pretty frustrating read because on both sides we've got people jumping in with more and more extreme takes and silly accusations to the point where it seems people are more invested in fighting an unrelated culture war than addressing the actual problem that is the bad voice acting.

There is no proof at all that the English VA for Wuk Lamat was some DEI hire or that the localisation lead is best friends with her and nepo-hired her. At the same time people criticising her performance are not automatically transphobes, and denying her mediocre at best performance and just blindly praising her because she's trans makes you look delusional and also is honestly just condescending and patronising towards the VA.

The reality is that her being trans has obviously made it more difficult for her to voice this female character. The VA was born with a masculine voice and therefore has to put in extra effort to put on a convincing feminine voice. This becomes even more difficult when she has to act out emotional scenes or has to shout and scream. It's an extra challenge she herself acknowledged in the past that she has trouble with. Which is why the voice acting for Wuk Lamat sounds so unnatural, unemotional, and amateurish. Especially compared to the stellar performances we're used to in FFXIV.

Now is this the fault of the VA? Partially, sure. After all, it's her performance and it's clearly not up to par. On the other hand, she's just doing a job she was hired to do to the best of her ability. I'm sure she herself also realised the performance wasn't all that good, but aside from stepping away and missing out on the money and experience of this job, what else could she do but her best?

In the end it's the voice director who has the final say. That's where the responsibility lies. And apparently the director thought this performance was good enough to ship. I don't know if it was the voice director who also chose and hired her in the first place, or if that was a casting director or someone else, but that's obviously also a place where mistakes were made.

I've heard people say that SE used a different VA agency for DT compared to previous expansions. I don't know if there's any truth to that, but if it is then people should be focused on telling SE that they want the old studio back instead of focusing on DEI conspiracies and "Woke Lamat" nonsense. I think that would be a way more productive way of getting SE to listen to your feedback and getting the English dub back to it's previous quality.

[Boblawblah]

This thread is a pretty frustrating read because on both sides we've got people jumping in with more and more extreme takes and silly accusations to the point where it seems people are more invested in fighting an unrelated culture war than addressing the actual problem that is the bad voice acting.

There is no proof at all that the English VA for Wuk Lamat was some DEI hire or that the localisation lead is best friends with her and nepo-hired her. At the same time people criticising her performance are not automatically transphobes, and denying her mediocre at best performance and just blindly praising her because she's trans makes you look delusional and also is honestly just condescending and patronising towards the VA.

The reality is that her being trans has obviously made it more difficult for her to voice this female character. The VA was born with a masculine voice and therefore has to put in extra effort to put on a convincing feminine voice. This becomes even more difficult when she has to act out emotional scenes or has to shout and scream. It's an extra challenge she herself acknowledged in the past that she has trouble with. Which is why the voice acting for Wuk Lamat sounds so unnatural, unemotional, and amateurish. Especially compared to the stellar performances we're used to in FFXIV.

Now is this the fault of the VA? Partially, sure. After all, it's her performance and it's clearly not up to par. On the other hand, she's just doing a job she was hired to do to the best of her ability. I'm sure she herself also realised the performance wasn't all that good, but aside from stepping away and missing out on the money and experience of this job, what else could she do but her best?

In the end it's the voice director who has the final say. That's where the responsibility lies. And apparently the director thought this performance was good enough to ship. I don't know if it was the voice director who also chose and hired her in the first place, or if that was a casting director or someone else, but that's obviously also a place where mistakes were made.

I've heard people say that SE used a different VA agency for DT compared to previous expansions. I don't know if there's any truth to that, but if it is then people should be focused on telling SE that they want the old studio back instead of focusing on DEI conspiracies and "Woke Lamat" nonsense. I think that would be a way more productive way of getting SE to listen to your feedback and getting the English dub back to it's previous quality.

This is how you communicate the realities of the situation without resorting to either hate speech, conspiracies or snark (I'm guilty of that one).

I'll bow out here, as you've said it better than I ever could and my snarkiness isn't helping the situation.

[RabendaShin]

This thread is a pretty frustrating read because on both sides we've got people jumping in with more and more extreme takes and silly accusations to the point where it seems people are more invested in fighting an unrelated culture war than addressing the actual problem that is the bad voice acting.

I've heard people say that SE used a different VA agency for DT compared to previous expansions. I don't know if there's any truth to that, but if it is then people should be focused on telling SE that they want the old studio back instead of focusing on DEI conspiracies and "Woke Lamat" nonsense. I think that would be a way more productive way of getting SE to listen to your feedback and getting the English dub back to it's previous quality.

Well put, and honestly this is what I attempted to convey earlier: if there are complaints about the quality of the product we paid for, we should address it concentrated, coherently and voice the criticism in a respectful manner - without resorting to memes and farfetched hypothetical situations, or worse, insults and mudthrowing.

To instead respectfully request that the devs take action and recast/replace one problematic voice actor to improve the quality should not be that offensive of a step to take, no? Or should it be lumped in with a big "we don't like the quality of Dawntrail"-thread where the actual issue won't be addressed?

I do believe the disappointing quality of Dawntrail's MSQ/localisation is directly related to changes in the usual development cycle. To assume the cause to be the change in hiring practices or having the wrong people in charge is a rational take, certainly if the involved parties are publicly speaking about these changes on their social media, and loudly so. Even moreso when the end product is visibly (negatively) affected.

One and one still add up to two: someone else got in charge, and the wrong people got hired. What we got was a lackluster expansion that does not live up to standards set before, with a few clear examples such as Sena Bryer's dismal performance. I personally don't care how it got to this point, or why, but I'd like Square Enix to address the complaints and take action.

[ViaDesperare]

So if she says she's trans and gay, and she's a trans woman, she likes girls cause to her they're the same gender.

Thank you for clarification!

Back on topic, I did fall into the twitter rabbit hole and kind of made some of my friends and FC mate fall into it too, to the point where they often send me a lot of tweets.

I would say I was driven to find evidence of Sena's ineptitude to voice act, due to people calling anyone who criticizes the voice acting or Wuk Lamat as transphobic. I kept using more and more of Sena's tweets because she can't be a hypocrite and not follow her own words. Since Sena is trans, and we're not the one saying her words, then the one who argues that we are transphobic can't call us transphobic because we aren't the one who said anything outside of using her own words back at her. If we do get called transphobic though, we could counter back with calling the attacker racist and misogynistic with what I found from Sena's tweets.

I just wanted to figure out why the voice acting was so bad for Wuk Lamat, so I kept digging and you can find everything I found, if you look at my post history or starting around page 103. Considering we went from bad and rushed voice acting from ARR, which was understandable due to reworking the game, to amazing British voice acting from HW until now, it was weird for me to hear such drop in quality. Anything related to the voice acting always resulted into 2 things: "You're transphobic" or "it's 100% the voice director". So, I searched and it wasn't 100% the voice director and people aren't transphobic for calling out bad voice acting which many people gave evidence to, all the yelling scenes/fake accents/voice cracks.

Would it not be the right decision to highlight her problematic inclusion in the English localisation of FFXIV to the devs in its own topic? Other actors have been removed or replaced for far less hateful remarks than the ones she has voiced publicly.

I mean if people are scared to do it, then I don't mind doing it. I just don't think I would be the right one, especially if asking for authentic voices. Someone from South America, so the Latin American culture, will have a stronger say due to the expansion representing them. A native Hispanic, or one who learned ESL, will have more impact and plus we who are not Hispanic cannot speak for them. I'm also newer, signed up because the MSQ and voices were so bad that I mass skipped after I got annoyed with Wuk Lamat.

The only thread I can really make is one for hating Wuk Lamat and asking to never have her show up ever again, but most of us can make that especially if you're from the thread where Wuk ruins everything. Anyone who hates Wuk Lamat will be branded as transphobic though, based on what we've seen, because of Sena, even if many of us don't use the English VO, so do think about that.

[Petroglyph]

nah the actual transphobia here is wild though.

we know very well hating Wuk's English VA isn't transphobic, but since her tweets were dug up (admittedly very groaty tweets), people that obviously have a beef with LGBT (mostly T) have taken this as an opportunity to not very cleverly express their feelings toward that group, but hide behind the fact that yes, Sena is pretty awful.

I mean actual conservative anti-trans forum signatures? Asking "do lgbt race change irl now?" lol I said, lmao

Let's please just trash her performance and awful fake accent