I always laugh about this one, because this is almost the same exact complaint about Goku from DBZ in the Japanese version vs the Funimation dub.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
[Kotaku] Fans are Concerned about Barret's Voice in Final Fantasy 7 remake. A "hyper-masculine cartoon" and a "Mr. T facsimile"
- Thread starter lowhighkang_LHK
- Start date
Wasn't AC!Cloud the result of SE taking inspiration from the way that Cloud was portrayed in fanworks? That's what I recall reading.
Wait, what?
The guy is an amputee. He is a single dad. An environmentalist. That doesn't sound very stereotipical.
He always had a badass, black dude vibe to me, which I feel is greatly preserved with the footage so far.
The guy is an amputee. He is a single dad. An environmentalist. That doesn't sound very stereotipical.
He always had a badass, black dude vibe to me, which I feel is greatly preserved with the footage so far.
Yes. When I listen to Mr. T, I have no problems believing that's his natural voice. Barret's voice is a very obvious affectation that makes it hard for me to take him seriously.
Ok... My opinion is that it sounds like a bad attempt of a white dude attempt on doing a stereotypical black voice. I don't know if its the same black VA who voice in the first trailer. if so then that's a pretty bad black comical voice. The first FF remake trailer showed a cool, smooth Barret, who wasn't so comical.
That's my big thing, too. He doesn't sound like Mr. T AT ALL.
I feel like people are only saying that because he's buff and has a mohawk-ish haircut. Which is...again, just hilarious to me given the conversation we're having.
It's possible to be concerned about more than one thing at a time. Indeed, it's possible to be more concerned about one thing and, while also concerned about another, consider it less important on the list of things one might be worried about.
Because that's important when worrying about his portrayal in a remake that will be played by thousands of people who never played FF7.
I thought the 2015 Barrett sounded much better but I'm holding judgement on this new one until we get some more dialogue. We probably won't see it in a trailer but I'm interested to see what current Barrett sounds like when talking to Marlene. It sucks that the trailers portray Barrett as this hard ass black guy when he has some really tender and tragic moments, I wish they spotlighted those instead of his shouting.
lol right.
I can't say I'm surprised that people here are fine with it. It's pretty par for the course with the gaming community. I am annoyed that other black posters are being so dismissive of those of us who take issue though, especially since it's only going to be used as fodder for other non black posters to dismiss us as well. I guess that's always the problem with having these sorts of discussions in public though since we obviously aren't always going to agree with each other.
YES! this is my biggest issue with the voice. He sounds like what someone thinks a stereotypical black person sounds like. It's ridiculous.
I guess the voice fits the portrayal of what japan thinks black people are.
I mean, it's unlikely he's going to be yelling and talking to Marlene like that, lol.
He definitely tries to be a hard-ass, 90s action movie leader, and comes to the conclusion over the game that he isn't that. It's not strange that he would be talking like that at the beginning of the game, where he still thinks he is that.
Now the whole, written like his writer has never once talked to black people, or much less a SINGLE black person... that's another issue altogether... looking forward to hearing more of his dialogue to see if it's still as bad as it felt in the original.
It's really awesome to be playing through this game as the remake is being reintroduced to the world to compare and contrast things.
The complaints about Barret's localization are not new and plenty of us who've played through FF7 have taken issue with it both in the past and now.
So why don't any of the non-black characters have text based 'accents' like that? That's the whole point. Being black doesn't suddenly make you sound like you can't pronounce or enunciate words correctly.
Everyone keeps trying to pass the complaint off as 'he's gruff'
No shit. He can be gruff without sounding like he's speaking ebonics like he did in the original translation.
There are tons of gruff characters that do it and nobody bats an eye, but suddenly the entire connection you guys have to barrett is that his text was written like this in the original? Cause fuck that shit was obviously racist and cringy even when I was a teenager when the game first came out.
Last edited:
No. The English localization team ruined his character by having him act like a Mr. T stereotype. Barrett talked normally in the Japanese version, as Tim Rodgers videos of FF VII have showed.
Stereotyping Barrett won't fly today in 2019.
Never played FF7 but I think his voice is fine and would love he to be like Mr T, he's awesome.
I'm going into the game assuming they'll have a person with an Japanese ethnic background voice Barrett in the Japanese version, but are there actually any black voiceactors in videogames or anime who could hypothetically get a gig like that? Same for female VAs.
Kinda sucks that it's one of those things you just have to accept is going to be the likely outcome for black characters.
Kinda sucks that it's one of those things you just have to accept is going to be the likely outcome for black characters.
User Banned (1 Week): Trolling in a Sensitive Thread and a History of Dismissive Behavior
Kotaku gonna Kotaku. Always classy lol
era gonna era.
she never called the line racist. She stated how the line feeds in the the racist idea of what a black man is. Clearly the person you quoted and you did not read the passage correctly.
I laughed out loud when I heard it in the trailer I had to pause it and go back to make sure I wasn't watching some sort of joke video. But no, they are really using that voice.
Yet the localization team went with incredibly stereotypical dialogue.
Wasn't Barret a bit of an offensive caricature in the original?
Doesn't make it right to not adjust for that in the remake, but I'd chalk that up to a culture problem within the company.
Maybe if they hired people of color, and let them voice concerns, you'd avoid these kind of stereotypical mischaracterizations of African Americans.
Doesn't make it right to not adjust for that in the remake, but I'd chalk that up to a culture problem within the company.
Maybe if they hired people of color, and let them voice concerns, you'd avoid these kind of stereotypical mischaracterizations of African Americans.
This has come up numerous times in the thread. Barret's dialog being what it was in the western version was an invention in the localization that doesn't match how he was originally written. It's also at odds with how all the people from his hometown, his best friend, and even his own daughter speak.
But it seems to be a reactive effect as in their were no issues till someone posted an article and many many people still do not get the issue as it fits the tone.
I kinda hate Barret cause of how blatantly offensive he was in the ENG translation...but I didn't mind how he was voice acted in the trailer. I'll need to hear more obviously but his lines just sound cool to me in the trailer. Not really offensive to me at all as a black FF fan.
Meh its probably just placeholder VO. Remember in Episode Duscae when Noctis sounded like he was a 40 year old smoker?
Plenty of people had an issue, there was discussion here as well as twitter. Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean no one was bothered.
To be fair, nostalgia is a big reason why remakes exist at all.
I've had issue with Barret since the original released back in '97. Even as a kid the stereotyping was blatant as day. Now that we have voice acting the issues with the character are even more prominent.
Now I'm not saying Barret wholesale is a terrible character. But there are certainly things about him that could be changed while still keeping the character who he is. The voice acting is one of those.
Yeah, this sounds better. I don't really care tho, since he still sounds ok imo.
Marlene wasn't even one when Barret adopted her. She's his daughter.
Edit: Not that age has anything to do with an adoptive parent being able to say that their adopted child is, in fact, their child. But the fact that Marlene is around Barret and yet, has none of his speech mannerisms is just another reason why Barret's localization is problemeatic.
Last edited:
Fully agree. I'm not black either but the type of voice they've chosen for him is the prototypical "black guy in a Japanese game" voice that I've heard many times before. I don't think they mean any harm by it, I think they just don't have the ear for it that Americans might. To me it sounds outdated and cartoonish and, to the extent that it resembles stereotypical "black voice", mildly offensive.
I have struggle to understand who this concerned fans are, the article is very vague with just one quote, comments don't seem to fully agree with them, since lot of them agreed Barrett is stereotyped but not offensive. Few results on this subject for a game released 22 years ago.
Is this just a debate of different opinions and not that impelling and concerning issue Kotaku want us to believe?
Is this just a debate of different opinions and not that impelling and concerning issue Kotaku want us to believe?
Representation in videogames wasn't as hot a topic 22 years ago as it is today. You could have racist caricatures and there wasn't a mechanism for people like me and other people of color to voice our opinions. Also, people like me who grew up playing games like FF7 didn't have the language or knowledge to express why Barret was such a problematic character. I just knew it made me feel like shit having a character that was making fun of people who looked like me as I was playing it.
22 years later and a lot of the people who grew up with FF7 are now part of the target audience for the remake, and now a lot of us have the life experience, knowledge, language, history, research, and literature to explain how Barret could be better representation
Gamers are constantly showing me that representation doesn't matter as long as they get theirs, so I'm not surprised by takes like yours. Why don't you read the article, some of the opinions in the thread, and form an opinion for yourself instead of thinking an opinion is trying to make you believe something. They write pieces like this to make you think, maybe so that you'll go do some research and gain more knowledge. What you do with the information is on you.
OP
OP
Difference is that one is a throw-away side-character with like 6 lines. Barret is one of the most iconic FF characters of all time, who probably has thousands of lines. So if you're in the camp that is bothered by this, there is pretty much no way of bypassing this. I wonder if using Japanese voices would be any better. As it's probably non-black japanese speaker.
Eh, I think the original Barret was literally supposed to be a parody of Mr. T appearance-wise, and the localization chose to parody Mr T with his dialog. But remake Barret doesn't really look like Mr T anymore so they shouldn't do that. We've only heard like 2 lines so hard to tell what they are doing.
The character should be angry cuz he's got a lot to be angry about, so I dunno how they can get around that. He's had his entire life ruined by Shinra and he blames himself for it and he's taken to getting revenge by blowing up a bunch of mako reactors resulting in innocent people getting killed as collateral damage. The game has Dyne, who is white and had all the same shit that happened to Barret happen to him and he's just as angry and even more violent.
And you got Cid, who makes Barret look friendly by comparison but has lived in relative privilege.
""Yo, jes' think about it… How many people in the world do ya think really understand themselves?" further reinforces Barret as some kind of hyper-masculine cartoon. Not a fully realized person, but a Mr. T facsimile full of weak bon mots."
Uh... this is kinda foreshadowing about the theme of identity in FF7. Both Cloud and Barret aren't fully realized at the start of the game. Barret is lying to himself about why he's leading AVALANCHE and how he's dealing with his own depression is very unhealthy. It's irony. Barret is a person that doesn't really understand himself, and he's coping with his own depression by clinging to a radical ideology and blowing stuff up to shift the guilt he feels.
To me Barret always came across as using abrasive language to push away people who might challenge his coping strategy; but he was a very caring person putting on a facade. It's basically a false identity he's adopted.
The character should be angry cuz he's got a lot to be angry about, so I dunno how they can get around that. He's had his entire life ruined by Shinra and he blames himself for it and he's taken to getting revenge by blowing up a bunch of mako reactors resulting in innocent people getting killed as collateral damage. The game has Dyne, who is white and had all the same shit that happened to Barret happen to him and he's just as angry and even more violent.
And you got Cid, who makes Barret look friendly by comparison but has lived in relative privilege.
""Yo, jes' think about it… How many people in the world do ya think really understand themselves?" further reinforces Barret as some kind of hyper-masculine cartoon. Not a fully realized person, but a Mr. T facsimile full of weak bon mots."
Uh... this is kinda foreshadowing about the theme of identity in FF7. Both Cloud and Barret aren't fully realized at the start of the game. Barret is lying to himself about why he's leading AVALANCHE and how he's dealing with his own depression is very unhealthy. It's irony. Barret is a person that doesn't really understand himself, and he's coping with his own depression by clinging to a radical ideology and blowing stuff up to shift the guilt he feels.
To me Barret always came across as using abrasive language to push away people who might challenge his coping strategy; but he was a very caring person putting on a facade. It's basically a false identity he's adopted.
Last edited: