Nintendo needs to fix their voice acting problems. It's ruining some of their games/marketing

[Deleted member 9486]

It's definitely an issue for them. That said, the games still sell like crazy so given profit motives they may not be willing to pay for better voice actors. It's not like BOTW would have sold many more copies if the voice acting was better.

They're not trying to make the cinematic, interactive movie type games Sony and other do (not knocking those games, those are honestly my favorites these days) so crappy voice acting doesn't impact the experience as negatively as it would for those type of games. There's not that many cut scenes in Zelda, so it was just cringe for a minute or two and get back to the gameplay. Where as in say Horizon or Uncharted if the voice acting was bad it would be insufferable given all the cut scenes, how often characters are talking during gameplay/traversal etc.

Xenoblade I'd agree more as XC (didn't play X) had great voice acting and tons of dialogue.

 

[LordOcidax]

BotW Spanish Latino is one of the best voice acting i ever heard in video games. XCX is good. FE Warriors is the only one i don't like, but ruining games.... lolol hell no.

 

[Deleted member 643]

What percentage of consumers who bought Zelda care about voice acting?

I'm glad they spent the money on Fire Emblem Echoes because that dub was superb.

 

[SalvaPot]

...I like cheesy VA, much better than the booming, try-hard VO of lost of AAA games.

Probably because cheesy dialogue reminds me of the shows and cartoons I watched as a kid and let me relax and enjoy the games for what they are,

 

[CrocoDuck]

I actually liked BOTW voice acting, except for Zelda, something about her voice acting really rubbed me the wrong way.

 

[belteshazzar]

Not sure about the others but the latin american spanish VAing was amazing.

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Yup, highly recommended

 

[Duane]

Wow, the King in BotW was actually Bill Rogers, the latter voice of Brock (among a lot of other roles). I didn't think he sounded too bad. Maybe a bit unconvincing on the age, though. But his acting (/exposition dump) was fine, I thought. Impa kinda had the same problem. Both of them had a role that was just a huge back story dump. And yeah, I guess maybe it would have been better to cast genuine age appropriate actors. Revali, Daruk and Urbosa were all great, I thought.

And now I'm going to defend Zelda's VO performance.

Maybe Zelda's accent wasn't great? Dunno. But I thought her acting and level of emotion were really good. I thought she did a great job conveying how the character is at heart, a scientist. The only times she really gets a sense of excitement in her voice is when she's talking about how the silent princess flower can't be grown domestically, or the physical properties of the frog she wants Link to lick, or the research that has gone into the guardians. But she's part of a long line of weirdo magical princesses, and is expected to do it, even though she has no interest and her powers refuse to manifest. The VO actress did a great job conveying that sense of frustration at her lack of powers, and her resentment at the fact that she was predestined to be somebody sight unseen from before birth. And then, her big emotional breakdown when it all goes to hell was well done, I thought. Her emotional range and execution was just fine, I thought.

 

[YearoftheWooster]

We need another game with Kid Icarus Uprising quality voice acting.

 

[Coricus]

Praising Kid Icarus: Uprising for doing it right: The Thread.

Actually learning about the Saturday morning cartoon angle was worth coming in here just by itself. You can really feel it off of the results, except it's better than average by THAT standard, too.

Nintendo just needs to have everyone who worked on that game on call. The voice actors, the director, the localization writer.

Or at minimum just make a sequel with everyone.

Gosh, I still have not played this!!!

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Why are you still here, then?! Pretty sure it's one of the few games $5 cheaper than release on the Eshop if you don't already have it sitting in in your backlog. Go for it!

 

[MajorBS]

It's funny.... When I think about how much I loved how they handled Zelda's character design and exposition in Skyward Sword it actually was really jarring to have Zelda in BOTW be my least liked character. Skyward Zelda made me really want to do everything I could to help her. Even play essentially the same boss battle over and over again. (lol) I thought she was pretty compelling at most times. BOTW Zelda doesn't have that same genuine quality in my mind. Not sure if this is just a result of the ENG voice acting, writing or a combination of both.

 

[Disclaimer]

I'm going to echo others' disagreement about Fire Emblem's voice acting.

Awakening and Fates had serious scripting issues with their dialogue, so regardless of the voice actors' quality, it was impossible to take a lot of it very seriously.

Shadows of Valentia had some of the best voice acting in a game I've ever heard, to be completely honest -- helped by the fact that it had exponentially better dialogue scripting, both for dramatic scenes and colloquial conversations.

Warriors' voice acting seems fairly inoffensive, for the most part. It's just that some of the voice acting becomes tedious because of their choice to attach voiced lines to basically every menu option. That's not the voice actors' fault.

Warriors' scripting also feels a lot more self-aware than Awakening/Fates, turning their hamminess up to 11, seemingly out of parody... which, while not comparable to the powerful scripting in SoV, is at least amusing a lot of the time. So its voice actors are often doing a pretty decent job with the comedic elements.

(Side note: the setting to automatically progress conversations without player button input, introduced in SoV, made the conversations and voice acting so much more engrossing and believable. Hoping future FE games follow its example in scripting and VA.)

 

[MoogleWizard]

I remember when Nintendo started to do voice acting, the first of their games with voice acting I played were Xenoblade Chronicles and Kid Icarus: Uprising and the VA in those games was fantastic. Now, years later, those two still stand out. And they were niche games. Now Zelda, one of their biggest titles has absolutely abysmal voice acting. Xenoblade X and Chronicles 2 sound awful after the first one had such a good dub. Did they drop the budget, or what is the reason for this?

 

[Griz]

Just do all voices like in animal crossing/odyssey/arms/splatoon. Weird ass nintendo language. Or make all humans speak like they do in New Donk City. Would make for interesting cut scenes.

 

[Gartooth]

I don't want Nintendo to abandon voice acting in Zelda though despite BotW being a mixed bag. Kid Icarus Uprising's voice acting added so much to the humor and characters in that game.

 

[PCPace]

It's funny.... When I think about how much I loved how they handled Zelda's character design and exposition in Skyward Sword it actually was really jarring to have Zelda in BOTW be my least liked character. Skyward Zelda made me really want to do everything I could to help her. Even play essentially the same boss battle over and over again. (lol) I thought she was pretty compelling at most times. BOTW Zelda doesn't have that same genuine quality in my mind. Not sure if this is just a result of the ENG voice acting, writing or a combination of both.

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She's not supposed to have that genuine quality. She wants to study science and is doing all these rituals that her heart isn't into out of obligation, and saddled with a babysitter she doesn't think understands her problems. She's genuine when she's finding flowers and frogs or exploring ruins. She's ingenuine as a princess and priestess because that's not who she wants to be.

 

[Disclaimer]

Also gonna defend BotW's voice acting, particularly Zelda's.

While her accent might not have been great (she's apparently Canadian?), she was completely up to par for her emotional dialogue. Same with Mipha.

It's not Zelda's VA's fault they decided to make Zelda the only person in Hyrule with a vaguely british accent.

 

[Fudgepuppy]

Breath of the Wild should've had so much better voice acting. Whenever I encounter a cutscene, I internally wish it's not voiced.

In my head, Zelda does not sound so frail and uncertain. Even the way she's written in BOTW is a whole lot less frail and powerless than how the voice actor portrays her.

In my head, Zelda sounds like Rooney Mara.

 

[BackwardCap]

There's a reason why Nintendo first party game characters rarely talk in general.

 

[Gartooth]

I think the problem with BotW was more the directing of the voices rather than the performances themselves. Like Zelda sounded fine to me, but making her keep an accent was a strange decision.

 

[CharlesAznable]

At the very least they could offer dual audio :/

 

[Graefellsom]

I actually liked BOTW voice acting, except for Zelda, something about her voice acting really rubbed me the wrong way.

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Same.. I found the way her character was written to be really weak and annoying so that may of affected my judgement of the quality of her voice work.

 

[StrikeFirst117]

Awakening and fates had a decent set of voice actors, it was more the case of the script having issues that made certain events in the game feel less plausible.
As proven with Echoes which has the best voice acting out of the newest ones up to now that's due to the script and dialogue being way better than the previous ones.
Also Xenoblade Chronicles and X had decent voice acting throughout most of the games, I'm not going to judge Xenoblade 2 properly because I haven't heard enough from the gameplay yet.
Zelda BOTW's was also fine for the most part apart from 1 or 2 characters imo. So no OP I don't think they are ruining their games with voice acting until someone can prove the fact that the voice acting in one of their games negatively effected sales.

 

[LightEntite]

Well, when you're late to the party....

The voice acting in BotW was pretty abysmal.

Not the kind of abysmal that stands out from other Japanese dubbed games? But abysmal enough to notice. Zelda's voice acting was hilarious.

 

[MajorBS]

She's not supposed to have that genuine quality. She wants to study science and is doing all these rituals that her heart isn't into out of obligation, and saddled with a babysitter she doesn't think understands her problems. She's genuine when she's finding flowers and frogs or exploring ruins. She's ingenuine as a princess and priestess because that's not who she wants to be.

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Sorry, I didn't properly explain what I mean't. When I say genuine, I'm not talking about Zelda's character in regards to the details of her personality or her motivations. I'm talking about how those aspects were portrayed. How she was acted/written. Believe me, I was fully interested in the idea of BOTW Zelda not being the standard princess set up. That first big story trailer really showed some promise.

What did you think about how she and the other voiced characters were written? I really want to like them (favs are Prince Sidon and Mipha!) but I often feel a real disconnect during tons of scenes because I don't believe in the exposition.

 

[PCPace]

I don't know, I'm not sure how literal of a localization it was, or whether they tried to fill things out or change timings to better match animations. Some of the word choice in the script was odd and specific, like the bird guy saying "It's Asinine". Mipha seemed like a very Eastern kind of character in her speech mannerisms, the way there things were talked about vaguely with assumed context. Zelda's dialogue and the way she would often ramble seemed the most "normal" to me, I think that's a character trait and archetype that's more or less equally common in Japanese and American media.