The first 1000 people to use this link will get a FREE 2 month trial of Skillshare Premium: skl.sh/austinmcconnell12 Classic video games are famous for their terrible voice acting. What gives?
As an amateur voice actor, I know for a fact that even brilliant actors have delivered lines dreadfully if they aren’t given good direction or, worse yet, no direction at all.
The best example of this is probably Xenoblade 2. The game is full of talented actors, but suffers from poor direction, despite this several actors were able to deliver good performances.
That actor's second take being included in the dialogue reminds me of a kindle book I found the other day that still had endnotes from the editor about mistakes the author had made. You hate to see it Edit: It was just a random kindle romance novel, A Lady's Forever Love by Bridget Barton. I found an epub online that let me go to the end, but in the Amazon preview you can see the clickable footnotes are still there lol
@@davidnjihia6781 I think people would love my localization. I'd do everything myself. Yes it would be a mess but imagine how entertaining it would be to have every character voiced by the same guy doing a slightly different voice. And of course it would all be one take
In the original japanese there probably was a good hint there as the acid rounds he's giving you with that line are especially effective against e.g. hunters but less so against the undead
@@utarefson9 fun fact, the game is originally voiced in English and the Japanese version just has Japanese subtitles. The subtitles say something like "It's powerful ammo. It works really well against living things" I guess there's a little bit more emphasis on "living things", which makes you question what the hell he meant by that
+Austin Forbes Why him? I know he kinda silently un-cancelled himself all that time ago, so I have nothing against him, but what does he have to do with voice acting?
Voice acting was such an afterthought it took people almost 20 years to figure out who the English voice actor for the main character in Silent Hill was.
9:24 This shit had me dying. "We must recover all the energy immedally, w- ... Mega Man?!" "But... where _is_ Doctor Wily?" "Dah's a goohd queshton. We may ab- ... be able to locate an... -other energy emmishun from the radar rooum? When we find that meatier, we'ww find Doctorw Waurwie!"
I saw this in something about mega man animation and I thought they were just doing it for a laugh but I did not know it was in the actual game. This is so much more funny now
He sounds like Homestar Runner saying "Dirk the Daring." Strong Bad makes fun of him and says "Dork the Daring," and Homestar replies "yeah that's what I said."
im getting flashbacks to the time a gacha kid randomly dmed me on discord saying that they wanted me to do "a little voice acting" for a "mini movie" they were making i assumed it would be a small thing where i (not even a voice actor) record a little line or two and then go i was wrong i was told i was now the main two characters in this series i was given a movie-like script but without any notes on how i was supposed to say the lines, and they were very unclear in most of their messages and also seemed to have a hard time spelling. basically i backed out politely because i was not having that shit
As a translator, what you described sounds much more like bad translation vs. localization. Actual good quality translation is not just translating things word for word, but translating them with their meaning in mind (without changing things too much to suit the target language/culture, like in localization). Localization can sometimes be a good choice and there are some excellent ones out there, but that is sadly not always the case and it's not even an option for every game/movie/book/etc because of the context, themes and story. Personally, I prefer good quality translations over localization, because that allows me to hear the creators' original voice and intentions better, but to each their own~ Sorry, I just had to comment ^^" Seeing people conflate or confuse bad (possibly machine or amateur made) translations with actual good quality translations makes me sad :< People usually only take note of translations when they are bad or ineffective (as one of the hallmarks of a good translation often is that it does not draw attention to itself), and it can be easy to think that translations are just bad more often than not. Good translators do not get nearly enough credit in pretty much any industry, but especially game industry.
Professional translation is NEVER one to one word conversation. All translation is (or at least should be) ALWAYS written with context and culture in mind. Even Google Translate tries to adjust to different tones by guessing the context. This is the first thing you learn when you learn any type of translation. Localization is just subcategory of translation.
Yeah that irked me too. Word by word translation is completely illegible so its not even a thing. Translation does adapt grammar and figures of speech to make sense. The difference is that localization goes even further, to the point of destroying nuance. For example pokemons' infamous jelly doughnuts which are actually onigiri, where they unnecessarily, and clumsily localized the snack. Translating them as a rice balls wouldve gotten the message across just fine and avoided confusion. Or ace attorney's almost tongue in cheek setting of its story in california, when the characters' entire lifestyle, from furniture to food, is blatantly japanese. That is localization, and its honestly kinda cringe and destructive cause if you have an internet connection, you should be able to search for foreign things you dont understand.
I was thinking the same thing. A localization (in my experience) is usually a bad thing and marks poor quality or low expectations from the audience as it erases pieces of culture and storytelling from the original to make it "easier" to consume. Changing the names, races, locations, etc of a story is a waste of time that only confuses everyone involved and takes away from (or sometimes introduces) story elements. I also have problems with localizations as they make the assumption that they can override the original works' intent with their own past what's considered okay from a translation.
VIDEO SUMMARY: It's because: 1) A lack of money sometimes meant non-professionals had to do voice acting, or having a few voice actors do all of the voices in the games 2) Poor script writing 3) Use of translations (word-to-word conversions between languages), which lose nuances or just don't make sense, instead of localizations (which also changes the script to account for cultural differences) 4) Because of the poor formatting of the scripts (basically a list of voice lines without order) actors were not given the necessary context to figure out the inflection or tone intended 5) Actors often did not interact or even hear each other's lines, so they didn't have knowledge of the context of the scene 6) No director, meaning they had even less guidance and feedback (performers had to just guess) 7) No time for planning, practice, or rehearsal, and limited time in the audio booth, so actors got few or no retakes
Another important thing to note is that when it came to recording english dialog, many Japanese devs would hire locally rather than outsource to studios in English speaking countries. A great example I always think of where you can see/hear this is the voice acting in the Mega Man Legends games vs. the voice acting in Mega Man 8 and X4. MML used canadian VAs and it sounds great, or at least fitting of the Saturday Morning Anime feel of the series (which is partially because that's where a ton of early dubs were done, and a ton still are at studios like Ocean and whatnot). Compare that the MM8 and X4 voice acting and... yeah. This is also the case with RE1 and Castlevania SotN among others... though I still think Robbie Belgrade is actually great as Alucard (save for a few lines), and I was super happy to hear him in Bloodstained.
Based on the title I was half-expecting just snide comments on bad voice acting, but instead I was delightfully surprised by a thoughtful analysis of the challenges of a difficult time period for even the best of actors. Thanks for taking the time to look deeper!
I love how the Perfect Dark team literally grabbed people out of the hall without notice to voice. I think the main character was a composer on her break. They did a good job tho in my opinion. It fit the game.
@@lvbboi9 The game was literally made by college kids in their free time cause they loved fiddling with Amigas. So they made a purposefully bad spaghetti western game parodying as much as they could think of.
Another thing is that I think some people mistake poorly written lines for poor voice acting. I don’t care who you are, nobody can make “I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with light!“ sound natural.
One game that really ruins the immersion is Red Dead Redemptions voices. The voice acting per se is actually fantastic, but the fact that the voices are incredibly compressed and scratchy really ruins your immersion. That and the fact that your horse will run away from you if you sprint towards it are my only complaints about the game
I really enjoyed doing VO for the Skyrim mod Enderal. I was supplied proper dialogue scripts with context, they had a database on how to pronounce every single one of the many special names an terms they had, and even though I did it at home alone with my desktop microphone I felt supported in the effort by the development team. Playing the game I also found that most of the performances were pretty great, especially given the fact that we all worked free of charge. Overall it was a fantastic experience and I recommend you give Enderal a play if you own Skyrim.
I didn't know they often read the dialogue out of order, I would've been so confused lmao Also didn't know a director is so important too, would've sucked to have no feedback or clues. I would've been SO lost lmaoo
I thought CGI Norman Reedus' eyes looked kind of dead, but then you showed the live action comparison and I remembered, oh yeah that's just what he looks like. That feels kind of mean.
This was so eye opening. It was really interesting to see an example of how a complex game script can be written in such a way that you have no idea what the context of the line will be. In the case of well known actors giving poor performances, I've always wondered if some of that comes from voice directors feeling star stuck. I got this idea watching the making of documentary that came with the GotY edition of Oblivion. They seemed so awe struck to have Patrick Stewart come in to read for the Emperor, that I had a hard time imagining any of them trying to give him any kind of direction on how to read the lines.
Awesome video. I’m a voice actor and I can vouch for a lot of this. All but one of my video game job voice scripts have been Excel spreadsheets. Translation rather than localisation also means that sometimes VAs will have to reword the scripts as they go. There is such an audible difference in working with a director too... it’s worth the extra money!
This video was fantastic! I'm reminded of John DiMaggio's documentary, "I Know That Voice", that had many VAs in it. What a lot of them said boiled down to, "If the performance isn't very good, then it's probably a rush job or bad voice direction." You can really hear the rush job theory if you play Fire Emblem: Warriors and compare it to Fire Emblem: Awakening. Both games were directed by Patrick Seitz and feature much of the same cast, but Warriors is significantly more awkward and less grounded sounding because it was a rush job. His most recently-directed game, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, had more localization time and is a day and night acting quality difference. Thank you for the quality video!
9:53 this is a practice I often do with "scripts for student actors" penny books I buy from local bookstores, great for practice but you'd be surprised just how hard it is to deduce inflection and tone from out of context script !!!
I'm glad someone actually covered the logistics of this. Every project I've ever worked on, I've had to pretty much give everyone a lesson on the basics for how to avoid mistakes created by the logistics of development.
that translation/localisation discrimination was really underresearched, Austin. The terms are different but you make it sound as though translation is not an inherent process of localising which is a broader term, and you also make it sound like one is inferior to the other. You might want to look up the term Equivalence which is more or less the product of what you have described as localisation. There is also word-for-word translation which is what you have dubbed translation, but there is also sense-for-sense translation as well. Neither is inherently better, mind you, as sense-for-sense usually sacrifices format for that message, useful for manuals or medical literature, not so much for belle-lettres. You may find more about multimedia transcreation and glocalisation on JoTrans, especially from Mangiron and O'Hagan
This is why appreciate the voice acting in Ys Book I&II on the PC Engine CD/turbografx so much and I wish it was discussed or mentioned in this video. Even though it came out in 1990 it had multiple professional voice actors and great direction. Just listening to the opening narration is amazing
excuse me, there's a mistake in the video, Jeff Kramer's voice acting of FBI Agent Francis York Morgan in Deadly Premonition is one of the greatest and most charismatic performances in any medium ever... redo the video, I'll wait.
And now we have masterpieces in voice acting like Spiderman PS4 where they recorded most of Spider-Man’s lines twice, one where he was winded which played if you were swinging on your web or running and one normal if you were just walking or standing still
Hey, at least you guys HAVE voice acting. I have something I have nicknamed "Blips" - deep, high, low pitches repeated to imitate older games that didn't have voice acting: with deep blips going to male leader roles, medium blips going to main heroes and supporting cast, and high blips being almost always female.
i was already familiar with town with no name from brutalmoose's video on it and hearing the line about the old timers spider felt like recovering a vital page of the necronicon.
Benny was voiced well (aside from maybe the sex scene). Also while there were some bad voice acting in early games there were some good ones too. Same with writing, whole down early games had bad writing, there were many that had good writing.
most of the good early voice acting for videogames came from games where only the main character (or some other important character) had 90% of the lines, and didn't have to interact with any other character
Pretty sure the two terms you're looking for is transliteration and translation. Transliteration is translating the words word-by-word. Translation conveys the idea of it.
Entered sceptical. Left thinking, "why is there such a preponderance of the past tense in his script?" My life: excel sheets, often times not so much as a headshot of the characters (video clips are a luxury), minimal if any direction that often comes from people who can't even tell me what weapon my character wields while making attack sounds for them, etc. Good video!
I think the divide between linear games and open world games makes this even more complicated. Rumor says that the lines for Oblivion (2006) were recorded in alphabetical order. Obviously not actor friendly, but in a game with hundreds of NPCs and thousands of quests, how else do you even begin to organize everything? But look at a linear game from the same era, Resident Evil 4 (2005). Cheesy, sure, but you can't deny that the performers hit the mark they were aiming for. But that game had the advantage of being linear, and was probably in a much easier to read script. This is part of what makes RDR2 and God of War from 2018 so impressive: RPG freedom with linear quality acting and writing. If we can look forward to quality like that in the future, even in the most open of games, I think we're in for some really special and immersive titles. (Great video, BTW. Very decent of you to give these poor VAs some credit for the impossible task a lot of them were handed.)
It was definitely good especially for the time. I spent hours and hours combing over the game to find every single little Easter egg and snippet of dialogue
@@dimesonhiseyes9134 "Alderaan... the Jedi Envlave is in Alderaan", and of course who could forget the infamous "Are you an Angel? Hope no kid ever uses that line." Iine KotOR 2. I love the KotOR games. Hundreds of hours well spent.
I found most voice actors to do a good enough job of displaying emotions honestly, only Bastilla lacked any emotion beyond the torture sequence and her getting annoyed with you.
@@jimmym3352 I love how these two comments contradict each other, oh well. I found the main characters to be the better VC parts of the game but sometimes when you doom an NPC to death it feels really c tier acted out.
Part of me wishes you would have given some recognition to the early games that got voice acting right, like Metal Gear Solid, Blood Omen, Soul Reaver, Medievil. Those all have great VA, and MGS is a great example of localization.
Did you know: Until 2016, the “Happy Birthday” song was not for public use. Meaning, prior to 2016, the song was copyrighted and you had to pay a license to use it.
More context! Is was made by a school teacher, and was originally titled "good morning to all". She would perform it most mornings to start the day off well with a bit of music. Gradually, she would start adapting the lyrics for specific holidays and occasions, including birthdays. The birthday version especially gained popularity, and a music company claimed copyright for it. It wasn't until very recently that the copyright claim was found invalid, and the song entered the public domain
This was a very informative video, and it makes a lot of sense! Thanks for clearing all this up. However, I'm pretty sure your description of the translation/localization distinction is mistaken. Another commenter (in the replies under your pinned comment) has given a more accurate account of what translation and localization mean.