This week The Rocketeer takes us through the weird cul-de-sac that is the Eruyt Village. Rocky suggested that it’s two parts Ewok village and one part Lothlorian. To me it feels more like a mashup of Lothlorian and the Playboy Mansion. Like the Playboy Mansion, the person in charge is an ancient creep that doesn’t want to talk to you if you’re not a supernaturally gorgeous underwear model.
This place is a mixed bag. I like that we have a little side-story about Fran. On the other hand, it sort of comes out of nowhere. And once it’s over she goes back to being a dull exposition dispenser with no agency. It’s a bit like the scene between Vaan and Ashe we talked about last week. Our characters don’t seem to have any arcs, or personal goals. Then out of nowhere we’ll get a little self-contained vignette to pique our interest. And then the moment ends and the characters go back to being static and stoic. In an ideal world, these moments would be spread out over the course of the game so that we can gradually get to know these people and cheer for them, and their arcs would unfold in tandem with the main plot.
Once again, it feels like this writer knows how to tell a story. The ideas are there. These little moments show they know how to make characters that aren’t Basch interesting and likable. They know how to write a dialog scene. All of the big problems seem to be structural.
While the party travels to Henne Mines and back, let’s talk about the…
Voice Acting

As I said earlier, I played the Steam version of this game. Sorry, the “Zodiac Age” version. Whatever. One of the interesting things about that version is that it gives you the option of switching over to the original Japanese vocal performances. I initially did this out of curiosity, but then decided to stick with it because I think it was a huge improvement.
I hasten to add that I don’t speak a word of Japanese, and I’m not making some weeboo style argument that “you haven’t truly experienced Final Fantasy XII until you’ve heard it in the original Klingon” or whatever. I just think that the English dub has a couple of annoying performances and the Japanese version doesn’t. (Okay, one annoying performance. But it’s like… really annoying.)
I mean, I could be wrong. It’s hard to really parse a performance if you don’t know the language or its unique cultural cues. I’m just going by tone of voice. Your mileage may vary.
Balthier

For me the most striking change is with Balthier. In English, the actor plays him as a loveable rogue and an unflappable gentleman. All of his lines are delivered with a smirk, like he’s some sort of James Bond / Ace Rimmer type.
In Japanese, not so much. Instead he sounds like a cynical shifty-eyed yakuza type. This arguably feels more appropriate to how he’s written?
Fran

In English, the actors playing non-human characters all make some sort of effort to hint at their non-human nature. In particular, Fran, Migelo, and Ba’gamnan all employ tons of vocal fry. The Japanese performers don’t do this, so the non-humes end up sounding more or less like everyone else. I think it looks kinda weird when hulking lizard-people Migelo and Ba’gamnan speak with normal human voices, so these characters fare better in the English version.
Ashe

The two different versions of Ashe are very similar. Japanese Ashe, like the English version, is an emotionally brittle dunce. She adopts a deer-in-the-headlights posture in response to exposition, with a few surprised little gasping sounds added in here and there to show she’s not catatonic, she’s just boring and indecisive.
Vaan

Vaan is the main reason to switch to Japanese vocals. Japanese Vaan comes across like a borderline insolent teenager, with a bit of a surly / detached affectation thrown in. This feels a little truer to how the character was probably written. It’s interesting because it makes Vaan more interesting by making him less likable. English Vaan sounds like a bored child.
I wanted to smack J-Vaan and tell him, “Hey. Straighten up. You’re guarding the princess now. Take this seriously.” For contrast, E-Vaan comes off as almost aggressively boring.
Bosch and Vossler

A dour, gravel-voiced mope in any language. Both of them. Which suits this game just fine. If I’m not having fun, then neither should the characters.
Penelo

When giving Vann a hard time about being a sewer thief, English Penelo sounds like she’s just shy and looking for attention. In Japanese, she sounds much more disapproving.
English Vaan feels a little dense because he doesn’t seem to notice this chick is into him. J-Vaan rightly shoves this pouty scold back into the friendzone, because when you’re starving on the street, the last thing you need is a partner that takes half the loot you risked your life to steal, while also complaining about how you acquired it. (Yes, she actually does this, the first time we meet her.)
Cid

This character hasn’t done much yet in the story. We only saw him far a few seconds at the end of Part 4. We have a few entries to go before he enters the story for real.
In any case, this is the great downfall of the Japanese version. While performances are generally better in the original, I can’t say the same for Cid. His English actor sells the hell out of his mad scientist schtick. He’s the only person in the game that seems to be having a good time, and the Japanese version is much more straightforward. (Or its idiosyncrasies are lost on a foreigner like me.)
If you play through the game yourself, give the Japanese vocals a try and see how you like it. Just make sure to switch back to English before Cid shows up.
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One nitpick: under Vaan’s section, you seem to have a screenshot of Captain Basch fon Ronsenburg of Dalmasca.
That must be him. Who else would be dumb enough to run around an occupied town announcing that they were a famous traitor / enemy of the state?
Don’t believe Shamus’ lies!
This is why I usually prefer subs to dubs. There’s also the fact that, as a native English speaker, I can tell when a performance in English is crummy. But, because I don’t speak a word of Japanese, a Japanese voice actor could be giving a crummy performance and I’d have no idea. There’d have to be something actively annoying about his voice to make me want to switch to the English audio track.
I absolutely CANNOT watch subs. I am an obsessive reader and with subtitles I spend all my time reading the subtitles and not paying attention to what’s on the screen. Yes, even when I’ve already finished reading the subtitle (I also read very quickly). So it’s pretty much dubs or nothing for me.
I’m in the same camp, I feel I miss the actual show when it’s subbed.
——-
The point about not knowing if a voice in a foreign language is annoying is a good one. I know a lot anime fans who hate the weird tropey voices you get in English, but I’ve heard that the Japanese is often the same, we just don’t have a good baseline for what normal sounds like.
If you watch enough anime, you’ll see certain stock characters and archetypes over and over again. I assume that’s what people mean by weird, tropey voices. It doesn’t bother me too much. I’m fairly selective about the anime that I engage with, so I probably don’t hear that kind of thing as often as a dedicated anime fan would. In any case, I developed a preference for subs over dubs because I started watching anime in the 1990s, back when English dubs were mostly pretty bad. They’ve gotten a lot better over the years as anime distributors have become more willing and able to pay for decent voice acting and direction.
Also, never underestimate the benefits of not understanding what other people are saying. When I worked in Washington DC, I was always grateful when the group of chatty tourists I got stuck next to on the train were foreigners rather than Americans. It’s very hard to ignore a loud, inane conversation in a language you know. It’s much easier to tune out conversations in languages that you can’t speak and, in the best case scenario, can’t even identify.
This works both ways, though, as IMO, it’s also much harder to appreciate particularly good voice acting (and good dialogue in general) outside of your native language as well. I usually say “a bad sub is better than a bad dub, but a good dub is better than a good sub”.
I suspect that’s what’s happening with Cid – he probably does come across as appropriately “mad scientisty” in the Japanese, but it’s likely conveyed through something Shamus can’t pick up on, e.g. Japanese has a huge range of dialects used in fiction that are associated with different fictional archetypes and a lot of it comes down to pronoun usage and word and sentence endings. (Not that English doesn’t have some stuff like this, think about “cowboy speak” or “valley girl” or “Scotsman”, but it’s a lot more prevalent in Japanese fiction)
That’s fair. Back when I started watching anime, good dubs were pretty rare though. Watching subs has become my default position, though I will switch to the dub if I find some of the Japanese voices insufferable. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Moribito.)
One other thing to note is that anime characters are often complete weirdos. I choose to believe that’s a genre thing rather than a cultural thing. I mean, I doubt that most Japanese people act like anime characters as they go about their daily lives. Nevertheless, I find the complete weirdo-ness just a little bit easier to accept when the weirdo is speaking a foreign language. I guess you could say that it contributes to the willing suspension of disbelief.
I experience the exact same thing between Polish and English, perhaps because a big part of my exposure to the latter was through video games or movies. Hearing “fantasy acting” in particular in Polish often makes me cringe whereas I’m fine with it in English.
Eh, that also depends on the game, Riviera for instance.
This is pretty much why I started watching subs, though now I have enough fragmentary Japanese to actually get something out of the dialog. Dubs just usually seem to have at least one bad performance.
I’m a person who almost always goes with media in its original language. Some people make arguments about the quality of voice actors, but I’d rather concentrate on something else:
When an actor is giving a performance, they have to understand the material in order to be effective in expressing it. When a dubbing actor looks at that material, a lot of things can be missing. There might be a subtlety in how the culture of the original country treats certain situations differently; a monologue that sounds accusatory on paper might actually be intended to have a feeling of sad resignation. There may be things that the original writers, who may be present during recording, know that can change how a voice actor is directed. The point is, the further you get from the original source, the more likely it is the voice performance is going to miss something important.
Now, I can definitely see the value in watching media translated to your own language. I didn’t like how playing The Witcher 3 in Polish meant I couldn’t watch the amazing facial animation as much, for example. Or how, when walking around a location, you don’t inherently understand the NPC chatter without looking directly at their character models. But there is no perfect solution, and generally, I think original language is worth it.
I’d say those are the kinds of things that the voice director should be aware of, so they can instruct the voice actors. Especially as they’re concerned with, and a part of, the entire production, so they should have a clearer view of the entirety of the work.
‘Should’ is the operative word here. But it’s often not easy, especially under time constraints. Is it possible to do it well? Absolutely! Is it opening up the possibility of missing potential? Also, absolutely.
One thing I find with English anime dubs is that I always get a sense they’re doing something wrong with the… audio mixing, maybe? Like, the English voice actors sound like they’re speaking directly into my ear, even when the character is in the distance. Is this my imagination, or is it something the Japanese do better?
This is a problem with dubs more generally and is not specific to anime. My wife speaks French, so we occasionally watch movies and TV shows with the French language audio track rather than the English one. It never sounds right. The issue isn’t the language, although hearing familiar characters speak with different–sometimes vastly different–voices is a little weird. I don’t know anything about audio mixing, so I don’t know how to describe it properly. The best I can do is to say that it sounds as though the French audio is layered on top of the sound effects rather than being mixed in with the sound effects, if that makes sense.
Here is a clip that talks about this problem of dubbed audio feeling “wrong”, even when it’s the right volume:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hl203g5k3Y#t=13m50s
It makes sense why dubbing over live action feels wrong compared to the original audio of the actors speaking, but I wouldn’t imagine that would be true of anime, where of course there is no “original audio”.
Traditionally, people point to lip-flaps as the reason anime speaking sometimes feels jarring – sometimes people blame the dubbing, but the truth is that anime just isn’t that interested in precisely matching lip flaps in the first place. That wouldn’t be a sound mixing coneern, though.
You still have to translate lines and expressions and all that from one language to another, forcing tropes or archetypes from one country to fit into another one, or try and imitate them when they don’t really come from your language to begin with which can sound pretty weird.
I’m neither English/American or Japanese(I’m Norwegian), though obviously I’m better at English, but I find having the original voices always make more sense. Original English dubbing sounds natural. You watch I dunno, Simpsons or Superman TAS or Gravity Falls, and every line usually sounds like a normal line. There’s a performance to it but it’s not that different from listening to English speakers on a podcast or something.
Then you watch an English dub of anime, and you get this strange sound to the voices compared to originally American productions, which is probably for a lot of reasons. You get 40 year old white ladies trying their best to imitate the tone of voice of cutesy japanese twentysomething VAs voicing high schoolers, you get new lines written to replace expressions that don’t make any sense directly translated, and you try to fit new sentences into whatever existing sentence is there.
This stuff is an issue with Norwegian dubs of American cartoons or video games as well, only the issue is usually that everything’s directly translated, so you get these super awkward sentences no voice actor can salvage.
Not to suggest there are no good performances in japanese media dubs, but I wouldn’t say it’s a contest between that and just the original work most of the time. Just like I wouldn’t say any Norwegian dubs eclipse their English counterparts except for some very rare instances of great casting and localization.
A lot of this comes down to “direct translation” vs “less literal translations that are more natural in the target language”. I tend to find the latter to be better and I tend to find that dubs are, in general, a lot better at this (at least with anime). You’re a lot more likely to find awkward, literal translations in subtitled anime than dubbed anime.
By far the worst is the old “fan subs” that were infamous for leaving things untranslated and putting in “translator notes”. The infamous Deathnote example of “Just according to keikaku [translator note: keikaku means ‘plan’]” is of course, the most famous example.
But even professional subs tend to be more literal than their dub counterparts. They tend to be much closer to word-for-word translations, and are often more awkward as a result. (Again, leading to some infamous memes like “people die when they are killed”)
I always point to Steins;Gate as a great example of this: the subs often dutifully transcribe Japanese jokes and cultural references, while the dub replaced them with ones that made sense to an english audience. Like here’s the sub translating a joke about 2channel, while here’s the same scene in the dub, which works a lot better. It’s the same fundamental joke, but not anything like a direct translation.
Not all dubs are as good as Steins;Gate, and it’s not like a sub couldn’t do this as well… (In fact, the fact that they’re a little less constrained by mouth movements should actually be an advantage towards less-literal translations) but in practice I find they largely don’t. I think this is because when you subtitle anime, you hire a “translator”, whereas with dubbing you hire writers who feel much more empowered to make meaningful choices about the localization.
I have no idea what subs you’re watching. When I watch anime on DVD, the subtitles are, as far as I can tell, invariably the closed captions for the English audio track.
Uhh, I’m not sure what subs you’re watching, this definitely isn’t true, generally. Certainly if you go to any streaming service, and pick Japanese audio you’ll have entirely different subtitles than the English audio. (The Japanese version subtitles are always virtually always produced long before the English dub is made)
And since I have an anime DVD in the drive already, I just checked, and it’s not how Funimation (AFAIK, the biggest English dubber of anime) does it – the subtitles don’t match the English audio, they’re the originals produced for the Japanese audio version. (I was actually expecting it to have both sets of subtitles, maybe some of theirs do)
Just checked a different DVD from a different studio (Promare, Gkids) and this one does has both sets of subtitles: one labelled “English: Original Language Version” (which doesn’t match the dub) and one “English: Deaf and hard of hearing” which does.
When people argue about “dubbed anime” they aren’t just arguing about the voices, it’s about the translation, too.
I’ll take your word for it. My anime DVDs tend to be older and I don’t watch a lot of streamed anime.
I’ve watched very few shows with both soundtracks, but I’ve seen differences between dubs and subs. “I’m here to take you” versus “I’m here to take you there”, “look into my eyes” versus “look deep into my eyes.”
Heck, Final Fantasy 12 is blatant about it. The English subtitles don’t match the English words, the actors add words for clarity or dramatic effect.
I definitely prefer subs vs. dubs, at least the first time I watch something. But I agree about sub translations sometimes being over-literal and whatnot. Not directly related, but my best anecdote about bad subs was actually a fan-subbed copy of Slayers Try on VHS one of my friends somehow acquired when we were teenagers (yes, I am dating myself here).
We were all (4?) of us sitting on his bed watching a particular scene, in which the character Zelgadis (who is a human turned into a chimera via magic/alchemy) is doing a deliberately over-the-top bleak inner monologue. The actual translation of this particular bit of dialogue was something like “My name is Zelgadis, and I am on a twisted journey through the barren wasteland of my own soul.” But this fan dub, for some inexplicable reason, translated it as “My name is Zelgardis, and I am a cyborg.”.
Cue us teenagers completely losing it, literally falling off of the bed and rolling on the floor laughing. It remains an in-joke for our friend group to this day.
I will take overly literal over bad “localization” any day of the week. With the original voice acting you can follow the tone of the conversation even if you can’t tell what they’re saying, and as long as the literal translation is still comprehensible you can turn that into a more natural sentence of your own to match the scene. Over-literal translations will still form patterns over time, and eventually you can recognize phrases that would be bad if spoken but always line up with certain voiced words, reading and interpreting them instantly like like any other phrase you hear all the time.
But localization as the One True Way? Absolutely not. My own bad experience with a fansub went the other way- blog post bragging about how it doesn’t matter what you write for big ridiculous attack names as long as it sounds cool. But I understood half the words in that attack name and knew the translation was bogus, possibly could have spotted it anyway since the attacks clearly had a naming convention while the text did not. And checking a different sub it turned out yeah I was totally right, the original naming convention was really cool and the one I’d watched before just didn’t care, thought they were too cool to do the thing they were ostensibly supposed to be doing. Dropped that group in a hurry except for a very few releases I was confident hadn’t been screwed up (usually by being personal projects from a single person or just bare/re-encodes).
It really depends on the show. Depending on the content and target audience sometimes literal is best, sometimes localized, and sometimes middle ground (maybe even with, le gasp, the dread translation notes!). But of course, with the fall of fansubbing (last I checked there were very, very few original translations still coming out in english, and not even that many tv-rip encodes, and that was quite a while ago), we get what the publishers are selling and that’s about it (and once they’ve sold it they have little reason to bother fixing any mistakes). I actually skipped a show some time ago because I’d heard the official sub was garbage, and there was no fan translation in sight.
I also prefer a literal translation rather than a localized one, and for the same reason that I prefer subs to dubs. The original voice acting is going to have the most effort put into it and remain truest to the vision of the creators, and the same is true for the writing. If the translator is going to go and modify the dialogue to their own tastes they had better be at least as good a writer as the original was, and what are the chances of that happening for all 20 or whatever translations are made of the show?
This is interesting, because it used to be the opposite. Dubs would tend to be more awkward because they had to fit the words into the timing of the original lip synch, whereas subs had the freedom to phrase things more accurately and naturally.
I always remember one moment in Macross Plus where Isamu and Guld are arguing in a mess hall, and Isamu fires an parting insult at Guld about him… maybe using the wrong appendage in a social interaction. In the sub the double entendre the insult was based on came through perfectly clear, and the word flow worked. In the dub the line was so mangled that just came across as a tongue-tied nonsense non-sequitur.
I’ve heard the original is usually recorded with everyone in the same studio while dubs are usually done in separate sound stages. There was some technical reason for that which I do not recall.
And yet it does. When I posted, the experience I had in mind was watching Futurama with French audio. It just sounds off. I don’t speak French, so it’s not the performances. It’s not the lip-synching either, since it still sounds off when my eyes are closed. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s because the French vocals are recorded in a different place, at a different time, with potentially different equipment, and mixed with the soundtrack and sound effects by different technicians. Put that way, maybe it’s just inevitable that the mix ends up sounding wrong.
But wouldn’t that bring up the question why he’s hanging out with her at all then, if she’s just being an annoying scold that he has no extra feelings for?
So, how hard would it be to photoshop an ‘H’ onto Baltheir’s forehead in all of the screen shots?
I am always shocked at how glassy and empty these characters look. The 16 bits sprites of FF6 had more personality than any of these automatons…
Yeah, full agree. This game’s got a lot of the “uninspired realistic 3D from console generations ago” look, and it’s precisely the look that never ages well. Even later and earlier Square-Enix 3D fare is capable of working some charm into their models, this game just stands out as particularly bleh to me. I can’t help but keep thinking Balthier looks like an AI-upscaled PS1 model from some angles.
Sometimes I wonder what the landscape would look like if the market-wide transition to 3D wasn’t so all consuming at times. 2D on home consoles vanished for years, aside from a rare few developers sticking to what they knew.
I remember that Windwaker got a huge backlash on release for being cartoony at a time when the PS2 and XBox games were really pushing the envelope of what was possible graphically in a video game, particularly in the fantasy genre. Now looking back, Windwaker looks fantastic and really self-assured in its art direction and things like Fran’s helmet seeming to be only a pixel thick look janky.
I’m going to do the old man thing again: I liked the older games’ approach of not having voices. You’ve just got the character art and their theme music, leaving you to fill in the gaps as you see fit.
Someone doing a voiceover for VI’s Kefka would probably sound like a Joker rip-off. Which, to be fair, he more-or-less is*, but when all you’ve got is his kickass theme song and his over-the-top sprite animation, there’s a lot left to the imagination about what he sounds like and is like to be around.
Of course, it helps that the music in said games was really good. I mean, while I think Sephiroth’s a dull, overrated anime cliche, he DOES have great theme music…
*Or, they’re both variations on a trope that transcends them both.
I’ve found while voice-barks have a way of being earworms for me sometimes, I on the whole am rather indifferent to voice acting most of the time and wouldn’t notice it being gone.
There’s some games I can’t imagine it not being there for, but those form the minority in this case.
Dammit. Now I want to waste time on Dissidia again because I never fiddled with the Japanese voices and therefore don’t know what Japanese Kefka* sounds like.
* While the ‘normal’ ending of the game seems to say that these are, indeed, the characters from the first ten Final Fantasy games (plus Vaan), all the post game stuff says that this is not really true, with the possible exceptions of FFI‘s Warrior of Light and Garland.
I got a sudden interest in picking up another language recently, and have turned around on videogame voice acting. It is very nice to attach words you can’t understand to the letters you can’t read.
I tend toward dubs myself, being a slow reader, particularly wordy scenes can cause me to miss something if they go by too quickly or there is something in the scene which obscures the subtitles. There was one game, I believe it was Lost Odyssey, where two characters are having a conversation in a room with large openings to the outside, and those openings were lit with pure white light, so whenever they were in the shot, the subs would disappear into the background and I’d have no idea what was being said.
If the game allows me to advance the dialogue at my own pace, then I’ll choose the original audio over dubbing. Occasionally, I’ll take subs and put up with potentially missing something if the dub is really bad.
I actually quite like Fran’s English VO in this game. Which is odd, since her delivery is flat as a pancake – but there’s a strange otherworldly quality to it – a compelling one, and it convinces me that the flat delivery is a feature, not a bug.
As an avid sub watcher, I was honestly surprised that Penelo’s voice actor did not sound like an artificial anime girl voice, but instead an actual, natural voice a young Japanese woman would have and speak with. Even Vaan didn’t sound quite like I was expecting, but I’m pretty sure male Ranma’s Japanese voice was pretty similar, so there was some level of precedent. But so few Japanese voice actresses are able to speak with a natural tone like Penelo’s. Usually you’re cranking the pitch up for young women, while hers isn’t deep enough for tough older women or old lady characters.
At the very least, it was refreshing in that regard.
I didn’t get very far, though. The attempted replay was cut short by the game leaving Game Pass.
While on the subject, we haven’t encountered him here yet, but Al-Cid has an absolutely outstanding japanese voice actor.
Al-Cid, not to be confused with Ol’ Cid, who we have encountered but have yet to encounter encounter.
Also not be confused with El Cid.
On a related tangent, I like being able to turn subtitles on when watching (English-language) films at home because it’s easier to pick up some of the dialogue that way, especially if the sound mixing isn’t great during an action scene. There’s also the fact that sometimes the context of the written dialogue is lost due to similar phonetics of the audible dialogue.
On the flip side, there is the problem people are complaining about above with anime of missing some of the action because you’re too busy reading, or if dialogue appears on screen too soon before actually spoken, which comes off awkward and can ruin jokes.
Yes! I can read probably at least 10 times faster than people normally speak, but picking out voices from background noise is really difficult for me, so when watching a movie for the first time (in English, the only language I speak) I often feel like I get maybe 80% of the dialog. Unfamiliar names are particularly bad, because if I don’t know the spelling it just comes out as a mess of sounds for me. (Sometimes I wonder how I ever learned to speak—the power of an infant’s brain, I suppose.) So given the choice I’ll have subtitles every time—I can read them in the blink of an eye, then actually be able to appreciate that joke or meaningful turn of phrase partially obscured by background noise, or make out that unfamiliar name that otherwise just sounds something like “Fluvhnrg”.
Same. It also really bugs me if I miss a line of dialog, even if it’s inessential.
My parents were visiting my wife and I five years ago, and we went to see Arrival. My mother actually missed the line (paraphrased, because I don’t remember the exact wording)
Who is this girl I keep seeing visions of?, which basically means she didn’t understand a major plot point of the movie because of one missed line of dialogue.The last couple live-action shows I’ve watched I’ve had this problem- pretty sure nothing’s suddenly gone wrong with my hearing and I’m not that old, but sometimes I just can’t tell what people are supposed to be saying. The audio range goes from way too quiet to way too loud, and between deliberate accents and/or natural accents and/or fantasy words (and/or background noise, etc) sometimes I just can’t tell what the line is supposed to be. Usually right when they start talking quiet because it’s something important. So hey, that’s what the closed captions are for.
I’m team sub for movies and TV -and some games. The issue for me is the quality of the dub, which in TV and movies is often limited by the need to approximately match the the lip sync of the actors, which can really muck with the cadence and inflection of the voice actor. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did a phenomenal job with the syncing -though with the result that the dub is ideosyncratic, and doesn’t sound natural (though in fairness, the Chinese characters are also stilted and ideosyncratic, so it works). This is less an issue with modern games that apparently have procedural lip sync, or have such rudimentary lip sync that it doesn’t matter. The new FFVII has pretty good sync on the mains, but side characters are little more than puppets as far as sync goes.
There are some exceptions -Bubblegum Crisis and Ghost in the Shell both have very good dubs. Madoka Magica had a decent dub, though I like the sub better.
Ghost in the Shell (the original movie and the SAC TV series) are the one big example that comes immediately to mind where I actively prefer the English voices over the Japanese ones. The sound of the characters’ voices fits their appearance and personalities much better, regardless of performance quality or language, if that makes sense.
I’ll admit I fell off watching anime some time in the 00’s. From what I’ve seen, English anime VO has gotten WAY better from the cringe old days of the 90’s when I first got into it, but I don’t have enough of a sample to say how much or how consistently.
I think one of the primary reasons people prefer Japanese voice acting in anime and games is that there are simply more people working in the industry there, so the director has more choices. Outside of Disney dubs of Ghibli films (which, IMHO, overuse celebrity voices), the talent pool is so small that the average quality is lower, and a single actor may end up covering multiple roles. For instance, I couldn’t make it past the intro scene for Breath of the Wild without switching to Japanese, because everything about Zelda’s voice and delivery annoyed me. When I started unlocking Link’s memories of Zelda, I felt like I’d dodged a bullet; I never want to find out how the English-speaking actress handled those scenes.
I think the only anime dub I’ve ever actually liked (since the Seventies…) was the original FLCL.
-j
The English dub for Black Lagoon is widely considered better than the original VO. (At least, for a native English speaker.) Some people say the same for Cowboy Bebop, but I remain unconvinced.
Also, I tried watching FLCL in Japanese. Impossible. The dialogue in places is simply too fast, I can’t keep up.
Interestingly, Black Lagoon is one where the number of different voice actors involved is about the same for the english (37) and Japanese (40) casts.
-j
On the plus side, FLCL was a rare case where the show’s creator had a major hand in choosing the English VO cast in order to ensure that the characters’ voices and personalities would sound “right”, so it should in theory be a good (or at least better than average) dub.
Been long enough since I’ve seen it that I can no longer remember first hand, though.
I’m not sure the talent pool size is really that different anymore – yeah, animation is higher profile in Japan than America, but it’s a pretty big market here too, especially now that video games are much more frequently voice acted. If a dub is reusing voice actors that’s likely a budget thing not a lack of talent pool (and even then, even anime is a much bigger market here so I don’t think dubbed anime is operating on the shoestring budget of the 80’s and 90’s).
And even if the pool is smaller, it often doesn’t feel that way to a native English speaker. For example, for the near-future sci-fi Planetes, I switched from sub to dub specifically because it has an international cast of characters, and the english dub sounded more international to me, while the Japanese cast all sounded Japanese. (It’s possible the Japanese cast sounds just as international to a Japanese ear, of course)
Newer dubs are a lot better, though I still tend to find one or two main characters bad. For instance in A Certain Scientific Railgun everyone has a quality voice actor but the voice for the title character sounds exactly like the sort of stuck-up rich girl she is not.
I enjoyed Star Blazers, the English dub of Space Cruiser Yamato. The company that dubbed it did something unusual that was probably only possible in the late 1970s. At that time American cartoons were a wasteland and there just weren’t many decent voice actors you could hire to do that job. Decades earlier, though, there had been a bunch of radio dramas, and many of the voice actors from those defunct shows were still alive and out of work.
So they got hired to dub Star Blazers, and it shows. Given how much the voice acting in American animation has improved since then, the show may not sound unusual to the modern ear, but at the time it towered over its peers.
I really liked the Ace Attorney dub. Part of that was because the subs used the Japanese names, and hearing “Ryunosuke Naruhodou” instead of “Phoenix Wright” was just way too jarring, but I think the voice actors turned in good performances as well. It’s a hammy show and they delivered the ham.
Wait, I have a second nitpick: author of DM of the Rings and avowed Tolkien fan can’t spell Lothlórien.
Personally I never cared much for sub/dub, I usually watch anime subtitle but it’s not a hill I’ll die on. As for game, I generally skip most of the voice acting because its so much slower than just reading the text and I rarely find it add anything of value, I’m actually a bit sad its considered mandatory nowaday since it just add unnecessary cost and probably contributed to the death of the “less than AAA game but more than indie” game, square used to be so good at making those in the SNES/PS1 era.
I’ll take this occasion to talk about an aspect of language/translation that I find much more interesting. When I was a kid I didn’t know English but I really wanted to play FF game so I actually played most of them without really knowing what was happening (I eventually resorted to using a translation dictionary to slowly translate everything, good side was I became way better in english than a kid my age should be, downside is that the translation of some of them were notoriously bad and my poor mastery of grammar probably originated from this). This ended up with a weird quirk where I would fill in missing information with my own interpretation of the event, assuming anything I didn’t understand was properly explained. I would chalk up any plot inconsistency to my poor reading skill and would try to think of a good reason in game reason for the events. One example of this is FF10 infamous (I guess on this website) plan to kill Yunalesca, I just assumed that in the game Yu Yevon needed a new sin every X years (maybe the final summoner would still age at the same rate as the person sacrifice to make it and would eventually die of old age) and so once Yunalesca died, Yu Tevon/Sin were doomed since no more final summon would be delivered, the question was just whether he’d die in the next few days or decades. I eventually replayed most of them (not touching FF2 again) and found that plenty of my interpretation were more interesting than the actual event. FF12 was actually the first game I played with a good grasp of english but it still took me a long time to realize the plot non sense wasn’t due to my poor reading skill (I think the event that made me realize this is what’s covered next week).
On a side note, I talked a bit about Baiten Kaitos infamously bad voice acting encoding quality last week (everybody sound like they’re talking trough tube), if anybody never played it, here’s a sample. Imagine playing the full game that way…
(spoiler for an almost 20 year old game)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKAdFzuoeMc
In Baten Kaitos, the player’s perspective is explicitly that of a spirit with limited access to the world. I would not be surprised at all if that “bad encoding quality” was a 100% intentional filter because the player’s viewpoint is literally not of that world and looking/listening in. Actually, now that I’ve said it, I think I’ve read someone else saying it was. Sound never bugged me, anyway.
Maybe, but if that’s the case it was an horrible idea. I heard it was compression issue because the GC disc had very limited space.
I speak one word of Japanese, and that word is Couldn’t Steal.
Oh yeah, nusumu (to steal) -> nusumeru (to be able to steal) -> nusumenai (to not be able to steal) -> nusumenakatta (to not have been able to steal).
Whenever people find out I can speak some Japanese they always ask me to “say something in Japanese” and my standard go-to is “sushi”.
Crap. Being tired from work I slept through the whole day and I completely missed this post.
You know, I can watch anime in the original Japanese and I can watch it dubbed to Latin American Spanish, but I absolutely cannot watch it dubbed to English. I don’t know why, but it always feels wrong. I feel like the tone of the voices never fits their characters, which is odd because I don’t have that problem in American styles of animation, even those that ape the anime style (like Avatar).
Part of this is that in general Latin American dubbers do an insanely good job. You might think it’s nostalgia or habit talking, but I’ve seen many bad Latin American dubbings and they’re as notorious as they are in English or other languages. But the good ones, they make a lot of effort to study the characters so they can convey the proper emotions, sometimes even better than the original voices. As an example, I watched the recent Ghostbusters Afterlife both in English and dubbed, and (no spoilers, since this is in the trailer), in a scene where they call Ray to talk to him about a personal issue the dubbed version has his voice break a bit while responding, something that Dan Aykroyd himself doesn’t do, and injects the scene with a little bit more emotion. It’s subtle, but noticeable when put next to each other (as a side note, they used the same voice actor that dubbed the character in the original movies, so he certainly has experience with the character).
I still generally prefer subs, though, because a consequence of this effort is that when it’s live-action they tend to pick words that better fit the original actors’ lip movement, which in turn can sometimes negatively affect the translation. It looks better and more natural, but sometimes the dialogue suffers.
Anyway, I’ve had this problem with Final Fantasy games ever since they started having voice acting, so as much as I’d like to blame only FFXIII for this, this is something I haven’t liked in any of the other ones either. I always think the English voices feel unnatural. But if any of these games have had the option to use the original Japanese voice acting in consoles I’ve never noticed. PC is a different story, I guess, but I never played any of these on PC.
That said, I doubt having the voices in other language would improve the characters in any way. Then again, I bet if they were in Japanese, which I don’t understand, and with the subtitles deactivated at least it would sound less dumb by default. Incomprehensible is miles better than blatant utter idiocy.
Hey, if you don’t understand what’s being said, you can substitute your own, better story into the plot. Just make up what they’re doing and why – it’ll probably turn out better.
Dutch dubs of cartoons are a mixed bag. I really like the Dutch dub of Disney’s Robin Hood (yes, the one with the re-used dancing scenes from Snow White and Aristocats), and I can’t stand the dub of The Simpsons.
Same with Japanese media dubbed into English, I like the English dub of Fullmetal Alchemist (haven’t really watched Brotherhood), don’t like various dubs of Lupin (stupidly little nitpick, though: I like how keibu (inspector) and tottsan (pops) have the same double beat, it doesn’t work as will in English).
I think you’re on to something about Cid’s voice acting being lost on foreigners.
I’m German and I’m used to watching movies and playing games in English, but German voice actors always make comedies more funny for me, even though jokes don’t tend to translate well. “Jamming the radar” in Spaceballs turns from a visual pun to absurdist nonsense, but the voices sound so much more silly, especially when they speak with that comically exasperated tone.
Maybe they’re just trying hard to compensate for all the puns that don’t work.
I prefer dubs in almost all cases, because I can’t pick up the expression in Japanese voice acting and it all sounds flat (I don’t have this issue with any other language).
The exception being JoJo, because the original character names are waaaay better.