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The Voices In Your Head: A Look at Video Game Voice Acting
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 2:02PM Michael Brown 
Anybody who has played a modern video game has no doubt experienced full cinematic cutscenes accompanied by voice acting. If a video game is trying to tell a story then these cutscenes are of vital importance. The developers need to make the characters believable and likable -- someone you empathize wish, and would invest time into their story. Voice acting can either make or break a character, or if it's really that bad, an entire game.
A few years ago when 3D cutscenes and voice acting came into play, everything was an open playing field. As time has gone on, a few voice actors have made an imprint on the industry, to name a few: Jennifer Hale, David Hayter and most recently, Nolan North. I'm willing to assume almost everyone knows Jennifer Hale or David Hayter by name only, but not everyone might actually know Nolan North, but you do know his voice. North has lent his vocal talents to the Uncharted series, the newest Prince of Persia, and Shadow Complex (to name a few). Needless to say, these, along with many others, have great emotions and talent that really make the characters come to life.
Now the people I just mentioned have actually become very well known in the gaming community, but what about when celebrities make the cross over into video game voice acting?
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The original Kingdom Hearts game (which came out in 2002) was one of the first big budget games to actually get good celebrity voice overs. Sora was voiced by Haley Joel Osment (the kid from Sixth Sense), Kairi by Hayden Panettiere, Mandy Moore as Aerith, and even Lance Bass as Sephiroth. That's right! Lance Bass, from N'Sync was Sephiroth! The game, for those of you who haven't played it was a huge success; mostly because of the cross over factor of Final Fantasy and Disney, but I'd like to think it was also due to a deep story, with really good voice acting.
Like I mentioned earlier, voice acting can truly make or break a character. After all, who wants to listen to a whiny, irritably voiced character talking about how their feet hurt? I sure don't. Sure, there are times when it's done on purpose, but if this person is part of your main party, then you have to settle in for 20 or 30 hours of whining. It's possible you may have figured out that I was talking about JRPGs in specific.
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In fact, one of my favorite things about JRPG voice acting is when the younger male characters are actually voiced by a woman (not only is it noticeable, it's weird). Tales of Symphonia is a prime example, luckily the first game, while it did have it's flaws, it was never too annoying. However I did always enjoy that Jennifer Hale voiced multiple characters in the same game. Unfortunately, time did not help this series because in the sequel, Dawn of a New World, the protagonist Emil, was whiny, shy, AND voice by a girl even though he was about 17. I don't know if his annoying character traits were ever remedied (I lost interest after I spent 45 minutes in the game on a mission to thank someone).
While the voice acting industry is still in it's infancy, they are getting better and better and with games like Heavy Rain on the horizon -- which is intently focused on story and cutscenes -- voice acting can only become more important.
What was a game you thought had good or bad voice acting? Leave a comment below.
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Reader Comments (5)
Comes to my mind the voices from resident evil. With the Jill sandwich n' stuff.
I really liked Kiefer Sutherland as captain Roebuck in CoD: World At War tough.
The mexican voices in fable 2 were also awesome.
The recent "Spyro the Dragon" reboot series has also had quite a bit of celebrity voice acting--the titular dragon is voiced by Elijah Wood, and Gary Oldman, David Spade, Wayne Brady, and Cree Summer have also lent their talents. (The last one you may not know by name, but she's a veteran cartoon voice actress who's voiced everyone from Penny on Inspector Gadget to Susie Charmichael on Rugrats.) And you know what? The voice acting is pretty dang good! OK, so David Spade isn't to everyone's taste, but Elijah Wood does a pretty good job. (Apparently he's a big nerd and really dug the fact that he was playing Spyro. Hee.) The SpyReboots haven't been to everyone's taste, but you certainly can't fault the production values.
Beyond Good and Evil is another game with rather impressive, if non-celebrity, voice acting--well, for the most part. There's some places where it's quite painfully obvious they only had about eight different voice actors to work with in the English version, but the actors who play the three central characters not only were clearly having a blast, but they really bring personality to their roles. Sure, they coulda gone out of their way and cast folks like Jennifer Hale and Patrick Warburton, but they didn't and it works anyway.
And while the voice acting isn't particularly prevalent in this game, I have to give some props to the Professor Layton series for doing voice acting--on a handheld!--and making it work pretty dang well. Yes, the fake Cockney of Luke is annoying, but it's otherwise got very soothing and charming voice acting which fits in very well with its storybook look.
You should be thankful you played only 45 minutes of Dawn of the New World. Some of the voice replacements, particularly Lloyd and Zelos, are awful. And seeing as how you're a Jennifer Hale fan, you'd definitely hate Sheena's new voice.
Dead Space and Bioshock spring to mind... especially the former, since it did pretty much everything in the audio department so damn well.
On JRPG's I'd hugely prefer the option to change the language back to Japanese, since even though I don't understand 98%, that language has characteristics that seem to fit the worlds and stories better. Also, the voice actors on default seem to be better than in most translations. Suikoden V springs to mind, that shit was pretty damn annoying.
Oh, and Castlevania: SotN is a textbook example. I'm so glad I played the Japanese import even though the menus were a tad difficult, since later on I heard a couple of lines from the dubbed version, and it was pretty horrible.
However, even though I've probably lots all interest of completing Final Fantasy XII forever, I must admit that the game had some great voice work, especially the characters of Balthier, Fran and Basch. Surprisingly, Basch is voiced by a black dude. It's great to hear the transformation to the almost clichéd voice of an almost clichéd defamed knight character.
gotta love the soothing voice of liam neeson as your father in fallout 3!