Editorial: Does Good Voice Acting Exist?

FFX’s VA isn’t great yet it isn’t as bad as you pretend either, Tidus and Yuna are significantly flawed yet Auron, Wakka and Khimari are wonderful.

FFX is actually in a funny position, in that while I wouldn’t label it as a VA success story I do however feel that the VA significanly adds to the characters thereof. I.E. at times Tidus and Yuna Make you cringe, yet at other times their VA’s contribute a significant ammount of character to their role.

I would also remind you that Persona 3 and 4 exist.

@SN – I haven’t played any Persona games, nor did I research them for this post, so I can’t comment, but the voice acting took away from the experience for me. It’s why I didn’t think I liked the story for so long. I couldn’t take any of it seriously. I agree that Wakka is good, and Auron had a few moments, but John DiMaggio seems to be hit and miss because I thought Kimahri was awful.
I think I agree with my friend when he says that we’re all way too forgiving of voice acting.

A good judge is to play it in front of a non-gamer friend and see if they laugh.

While FFX’s VA was technically hit and miss, I actually thought it was much better than FFXII since it actually had an emotional arc to work with. The FFX charactors may not have been perfect but the characters that they played were perfectly defined and IMO absolutely unforgetable.

I really liked the voice acting in FFXII personally!

As for FFX, terrible. Absolutely terrible. The “HA HA!” scene with Yuna is deservedly lambasted as one of the worst in voice-acting history; a field replete with travesties.

@SN: Kimahri sounds like a really bad American Indian impression. It’s the kind of thing you’d probably understand only by living in North America. To us, it sounds a bit like an American doing a Crocodile-Dundee-”Shrimp-on-da-barbie!”-type Australian accent would sound to you. Wakka’s voice is as annoying as fuck-all, and Tidus is perhaps the whiniest emo-kid on the block. I’m astonished you can stand him!

The only decent voice acting in FFX is for Auron, who is the sole character of any redeeming merit whatsoever. His involvement in the storyline is all that pulled me through that game–and it took more than three tries to do it. Considering that the rest of the game is unmitigated bilge, Auron’s feat in pulling me through assumes herculean qualities.

The voice acting in FFXII is largely solid and seldom over-the-top. It comes across as a sort of period piece with a Victorian prose delivered in a very satisfactory way: a bit like watching a Dickens interpretation on Masterpiece Theatre.

My favourite voice acting is nevertheless reserved for Lost Odyssey, Valkyria Chronicles, and (surprisingly, perhaps) Disgaea. The first two are stellar examples of the sort of diligent and realistic work which most companies aspire to but never reach, and the latter example is the sort of hilarious, deliberately-over-the-top anime-style nonsense which most companies descend to purely by accident; in which case it is a disaster. In Disgaea’s case, it is a deliberate choice of localisation and serves only to make an already hilarious script more so.

Khimari had few enough lines to leave a light footprint on FFX for me, though as you say I don’t have the right kind of cultural capital to interpret him in the same way as you, it never even occured to be that he sounded like a native american. As for Wakka Joe Dimaggio did one of my favourite VA jobs I have ever been privilaged to be privvy to. I cannot stress how much I loved the work he did with Wakka.

Incidentally, I thought Joe DiMaggio was a baseball star.

Rather tangentally from this article, but am I the only person on Earth who prefers the old text-only approach over the modern voice-acting method? I appreciate that it is cinematic and realistic and modern and technological and so on, but I honestly prefer simply reading the text in every instance.

Even in games where I love the voice acting, I would have preferred to have the text alone. Then, the voices of the characters are in my head, and I hear them as I feel they should sound given their dialogue.

I dunno, perhaps I am just an old fogey.

Lusipurr will tell you that I have a man crush on Balthier’s voice.

By and large, I agree with everything EvilPaul said, especially the part about the laughing scene (I was planning on posting the same youtube link).

And @Lusipurr, I too prefer text-only. My theory is, whatever dialogue characters are saying, it ALWAYS sounds better in your head than said out loud. For example, I love Crisis Core, but when I first started playing it, I hated the voice acting. It took until about 1/2 way through the game to realize the reason I hated it was through no fault of the actors themselves, but rather because it didn’t match the voices I had for the FFVII cast in my head from playing the original game.

My strategy to counter this is, whenever the option’s available, turn the audio to Japanese. Not because I’m a subtitle snob or anything, but rather because I no longer understand the dialogue. There’s something there that’s not just dead air, but I don’t know nearly enough Japanese to know when something mock-worthy.

The one game I’ve broken this rule for in recent memory is Lost Odyssey, and that was for Jansen’s voice alone. That’s the one time I can think of when the voiced dialogue actually added something to the character I wouldn’t have gotten just from reading the text on screen.

@Darth – Yeah, I’ll turn the game to Japanese VA for almost the exact same reason. I really didn’t like it in Blue Dragon or Eternal Sonata, so I change it to Japanese, and that way I can’t really TELL if it’s bad voice acting or not!

@Thea – Larsa’s voice was one of my favourites! I’m glad it grew on you.
And I agree somewhat about the text.
I love the script in FF9, but I know for a fact that if it were voice acted, it would sound awful. It was written to be read, not spoken.

@Thea: I’m playing VC as I wright this, and the Japanese does wonders for the voice acting :D

@MC – I don’t know. I think your description of Tidus is accurate, but I still don’t think the voice actor does a good job making that character believable.
Also, I don’t think the Japanese voice acting makes it any better. Like I said, I can’t tell if it does, and that – to me – makes it better than bad voice acting.
And I’m glad you feel that most actors are good at conveying their characters. I truly wish I could share that sentiment.
I’m just glad I can throw away my skepticism a lot of the time to just try and enjoy the game.

I don’t understand why games don’t have a DISABLE feature next to the ENGLISH and JAPANESE options.

You can disable the subtitles. Why can’t you disable the annoying flibbertigibbeting?

I’m with MasterCheif, I think a VA is doing a good job if they contribute positively to the characters they portray, and IMO James Arnold Taylor breather a lot of life into the character of Tidus. There are also many instances in which he dropped the ball when playing Tidus such as the infamous laughing scene, but I have always thought that this was likely down to time constraints more than anything else. It would been a difficult scene to pull off and I doubt they had enough time to do so. The reason why I liked the VA work by James Arnold Taylor and John Dimaggio so much, is because to the genuing warmth they brought to the role. I thought both were very well suited to the roles that they played and I really apprieciated how they made their characters sound and how well their contribution helped to define their characters.

Also line ten (genuine rather than genuing, damn lack of editing).

I thought he did a good albeit flawed job as Tidus. His main problem IMO was that he sometimes had to rush his lines to fit with the Japanese lip syching. Probably my least favourite VA work in FFX was Yuna as she sometimes sounded increadibly awkward, yet her VA was fine in X-2 so I don’t think it was due to lack of talent.

@SN – Yeah, exactly. Although I really didn’t like the voice acting in X, I entirely concede that it could really have very little to do with the actors. I also completely agree with what you said about Yuna.

@Darth – Yeah, same with me, I’ll only notice if it’s particularly bad or particularly spectacular. Unfortunately my experience reserved that percentage with FFX, so I noticed 90% of the time.

@MC – Yeah, absolutely my problems with FFX’s VA are varied and one can never pinpoint the problem. There are too many potential sources with video games.
But I do agree that the scene makes sense, and that the laughs actually SHOULD be awkward at first. I don’t even cite that scene as the most awkward. For that, I go to the scene in Home when Tidus finds out the true consequences of the pilgrimage. The scene should be emotional and powerful, but I cringe and/or laugh the whole time. It’s really a shame.
But again, that’s the fault of MANY things, not necessarily just the acting by any means.

Is the original Resident Evil’s first 15 minutes on Youtube? It was pretty awesomely bad.

@Paul – Ouch. Just ouch. Yeah, the first RE was absolutely atrocious. Though in many ways, that was part of its charm. It was supposed to be B-grade horror, after all. That series improved rapidly from game to game, though. Compare 1 to 2, or 2 to 3, etc. In many cases, using some of the same actors even. Capcom probably paid a mint for acting lessons.

I rather have awesomebad dubs like RE1 and Symphony of the Night’s (DIE MONSTER! YOU DON’T BELONG IN THIS WORLD!) than bad dubs that dub lovers call good (FFX IMO, no offense). At least you can laugh out loud with awesomebad dubs.