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The companies that dub... suck. Discuss here!
madstork91
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My first post on the PA forums... I am so nervous.
The Voices Of Characters Voice acting
I have been watching a lot of anime recently (a dangerous topic sometimes among grown men in the real world) and I also recently (within an hour ago) clicked an Ad on the home page of PA...
http://eternalsonata.namcobandaigames.com/
I was redirected to what initially looked like any rpg out recently that isn't FF. I looked through some things: screenshots, listened to the music, etc. I finally got around to watching the preview, not too horrible looking I thought. The girl walking me towards the edge of a cliff reminded me of a certain female dying in a certain RPG of some note.
Then ~ 10 seconds into the movie (if you can call small previews that) I heard a voice... A deep voice... The voice of a Man. Not a boy mind you but a man. A grown man. The kind of voice that has had much pain and suffering. The kind of voice that lost his love when he was a young man and now he would drink her memory away if drinking would dishonor her memory in some way and without being aided by the drink he is barely able to carry on. The problem with this? All of the characters, as usual, look like they are in their early teens. Girlish in fact.
The rest of the voices, of course, sound feminine.
There is a video game that came out quite some time ago, Star Ocean: The second story, that got mixed reviews. I personally loved it. And at the time I did not mind that voices that much, but they were annoying. Most of the reviews I read about the game before buying mentioned the horrible voices...
Naruto, a popular anime here in the states among kids...
Naruto, a popular anime in Jap among a much older crowd.
Onepiece... I think anyone who knows about anime and how it is sometimes treated needs no explanation.
There are of course good examples... Like OutlawStar
Ive comprised a list of rules for importing things, or making things in the states.
In short, old people should look and sound like old people. Young people should look and sound like old people. Weird, freaky, girl/guy characters that are supposed to be guys should look and never sound like that.
I don't totally mind having a protagonist in a story that looks feminine; though some of the more memorable and successful games lately have had more masculine protagonists. I do mind having the audio reinforcement that the male characters I am looking at not only look like females, but sound like them too.
Sorry for the long winded ness of this.
-Stork91 out
The Voices Of Characters Voice acting
I have been watching a lot of anime recently (a dangerous topic sometimes among grown men in the real world) and I also recently (within an hour ago) clicked an Ad on the home page of PA...
http://eternalsonata.namcobandaigames.com/
I was redirected to what initially looked like any rpg out recently that isn't FF. I looked through some things: screenshots, listened to the music, etc. I finally got around to watching the preview, not too horrible looking I thought. The girl walking me towards the edge of a cliff reminded me of a certain female dying in a certain RPG of some note.
Then ~ 10 seconds into the movie (if you can call small previews that) I heard a voice... A deep voice... The voice of a Man. Not a boy mind you but a man. A grown man. The kind of voice that has had much pain and suffering. The kind of voice that lost his love when he was a young man and now he would drink her memory away if drinking would dishonor her memory in some way and without being aided by the drink he is barely able to carry on. The problem with this? All of the characters, as usual, look like they are in their early teens. Girlish in fact.
The rest of the voices, of course, sound feminine.
There is a video game that came out quite some time ago, Star Ocean: The second story, that got mixed reviews. I personally loved it. And at the time I did not mind that voices that much, but they were annoying. Most of the reviews I read about the game before buying mentioned the horrible voices...
Naruto, a popular anime here in the states among kids...
Naruto, a popular anime in Jap among a much older crowd.
Onepiece... I think anyone who knows about anime and how it is sometimes treated needs no explanation.
There are of course good examples... Like OutlawStar
Ive comprised a list of rules for importing things, or making things in the states.
1) If your characters look feminine, give them feminine voices.
2) If your characters have feminine voices... Just leave them out of the game. Because we hate them on anything but girls. No... really. Unless your target audience is between the ages of 5 and 10 leaving them out is a good/great idea.
3) If you really, really, really want to give them bad #$% scruffy cool voices... or sexy sultry voices... Make them look as if they should have those voices. Ex: not like kids, hermaphrodites, or transsexuals.
2) If your characters have feminine voices... Just leave them out of the game. Because we hate them on anything but girls. No... really. Unless your target audience is between the ages of 5 and 10 leaving them out is a good/great idea.
3) If you really, really, really want to give them bad #$% scruffy cool voices... or sexy sultry voices... Make them look as if they should have those voices. Ex: not like kids, hermaphrodites, or transsexuals.
In short, old people should look and sound like old people. Young people should look and sound like old people. Weird, freaky, girl/guy characters that are supposed to be guys should look and never sound like that.
I don't totally mind having a protagonist in a story that looks feminine; though some of the more memorable and successful games lately have had more masculine protagonists. I do mind having the audio reinforcement that the male characters I am looking at not only look like females, but sound like them too.
Sorry for the long winded ness of this.
-Stork91 out
Tech reviews, another forum to talk in... w/e.madstork91 on
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Um... no?
What game doesnt have this option?
I really do mean to apply this to more than just games... A lot of things that come to the states from other countries have this problem.
It is a shame too... Most of it would do a lot better they simply had voices to match.
...
1) I look like your avatar... And I love that anime. It did not suffer from the bad VA
2) I had been on edge about this kind of thing... That movie put me in the mood for writting about it.
Anyway, I think Cowboy Bebop was way way better with English voice actors. The Japanese voices kind of sucked.
So knock it off.
Fuck shit cunt bitch ass bastard damn hell
I don't see anyone making fun of him for being dorky. In fact, the only way I can see to twist people's remarks into a form of mockery pertaining to "dorkiness" is if people are making fun of him for not being dorky enough. What's actually going along is that he's arguing that other people's work/stories/characters/creations should be twisted to fit his comfort-zones or barred from distribution in countries other than where it came from.
I have nothing against dorky. But this is Debate and Discourse, not a blog to whine about things you don't like. If he wanted to have a discussion about the current state of the voice acting industry in the united states and japan, we could do that, but this isn't even close.
I don't think the voices sucked, per say, but I prefer the English voice actors for CB as well.
And the director of FLCL really likes the dub.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
You like big gruff guys to sound like they were rejected from queer eye? Their Orig jap voices actually fit the characters... When they do the VA, in most cases, they get very feminine voices. Thus they are being distorted from the orig work/story/character/creation.
Thanks.
Most discourse begins with a thought or prose, atleast I thought it did.
Either way... nothing is stopping this being a discussion or debate other then people taking it as an absolute other than my opinion. It is not like they are going to change tomorrow, if at all. But still... I felt I had to state my opinion where peers could either yay, nay, or redirect the ideas on how the current VA sucks.
Oh... and as for censoring myself, I try not to cuss.
Nonsense. Adults aren't the ones watching Naruto in Japan. Its popularity is driven by the middle school and elementary school crowd.
Except you didn't say this. You called him a mouth-breather, and I think Irond Will's interpretation of your post was valid at the time, since you provided no valuable information or context.
You do this a lot, by the way.
Not to say he was singling you out, at least I don't think he was; there are a lot of stupid posts at the beginning of this thread.
As for the topic at hand, voice-acting is kind of in flux right now. Anime is already stuck where it is, I don't see English voice-acting in Anime dubs ever improving. There are various examples where the English dubs ARE good, but by and large they pander to the consumer crowd and there is really no impetus to preserve their artistic integrity.
For games, though, quality seems to be all over the place. You have games like Magna Carta and Ys: Ark of Napishitim and then Final Fantasy XII and Digital Devil Saga which are two of the best examples you can find. What kills me is that ATLUS published both Magna Carta and Digital Devil Saga. What a massive difference.
Proper voice acting is important.
These rules, you posted them, right? Where you demanded that people twist their work to suit your preferences for what characters "should" look like and "should" sound like, rather than what the author thinks? Your rules state that Vicious should not have been in the North American release of Cowboy Bebop at all.
I'm not sure I can help. I think dubs are an abomination.
Like this, for instance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiQ0CrRVoPg
Fucking garbage as far as I'm concerned. I know other people have no problem with this, but I want to stab myself in the ears right now.
Everything was appropriate to me except for that ridiculous delivery man's voice.
Indeed, the characters should speak in their own voices, like in live-action movies.
Case and point. I literally want to stab my ears. Every voice there is so beyond awful to me...I'm literally offended by that clip. The entire Evangelion dub offends me as a, hell, as a customer.
But, everyone has their own tastes. Four of five years ago I would be arguing to end dubbing, but at this point most animes offer a dub and a subtitle, so I don't care. I'm glad people have the choice.
I do think, though, that games may never really reach the point where dual language becomes the norm. So, for me, dubbing is a big issue there. I'd prefer - if only one option were possible - that subs were provided instead of dubs. There are a number of reasons:
1) Quicker localizations. It's much faster to generated and QA subtitles than it is to localize and dub a script. It's also cheaper.
2) The above point leads to quicker North American/European releases. I think some companies, though - like Square - like to stagger their regional releases on purpose and the lucrative almost symbiotic localization industry provides a plausible excuse for such companies to hide behind.
3) Subs would allow "extra" content to come out here more often. See: Persona 3 FES, Square's "Final Mix" and "International" game versions.
4) Artistic integrity. Even if the Japanese voices suck, they are what the original team intended. I'd sometimes rather have bad Japanese voices than better English dubs if the script was heavily modified in the process.
Just my opinion.
They should just use speech bubbles with emoticons.
And to Drez: No fucking way I'd put up with subtitles in my games. I mean, watching an anime is one thing. You're just watching. But I want to be able to understand everything without reading some subtitles when I'm fighting a massive boss or slaughtering thousands.
If you're not going to contribute to the thread, find a different one to shit in.
Pointing out inconsistencies in your position isn't contributing? All anime with any audio-track is dubbed. Pictures don't make quite the sort of noises you would expect to hear during say a sword-fight. Also the main problem I have with the Eva dub is that they didn't do much if anything to keep the background sound that should lay on top of the vocals actually on top of the vocals. The voices end up sounding disconnected from ambient sound, which fucks with me. Regardless, "dubs are an abomination" is a pretty absurd generalization.
Uh...what?
First off, your post is hilarious considering voice acting is a relatively new commodity in video games. Well, not new per se, but it's only existed in about half the lifespan of "videogames." There exists at least 15 years worth of games that had graphics and text and no voice. A great many of us "put up" with that.
And usually people aren't furthering the plot or spouting dialogue when you're fighting a boss, so I have no idea what you're talking about there.
Regardless of whether or not you're willing to "put up" with them, a number of games offer both, all games SHOULD offer both, and some games only offer subtitles.
It's really odd to hear "no fucking way" you'd put up with subtitles considering subtitles have always and will always exist in video games.
My assumption is that you're talking about Japanese dubs with English subtitles. That's what I'm not going to put up with in my games.
Being pedantic is not contributing. Correct.
You know perfectly well that I was referring to localized English dubs when I said "dubs are an abomination." So, here it is, "localized English dubs are an abomination." And the reason the English dub in Evangelion sucks, aside from the ambient sound, is that the characters do not sound introspective or anything. They sound like the Anime equivalent of "valley girls" - generic, stereotypical, voice-crackling teenagers.
Shinji shouldn't sound like he sounds in the English dub and it completely obliterates any quality or meaning Evangelion has, in my opinion. The way Shinji presents himself is rather integral to the story.
Can you define "not going to put up with," please? Like, if they stop putting English dubs in, what do you plan on doing? "Not going to put up with" sounds rather confrontational.
Are you saying that Japanese audio tracks and English subtitles shouldn't even exist, because unless you've been very careful in your game purchases, you're going to find that some of your games already have these things you're not going to put up with.
A good many games are already Japanese-only. One good example is Shadow of the Colossus. No English voices there.
Both females have what sounds like 30 year olds for voices. That includes the emotionless teenage girl.
As for the his voice... I think it fits, though it could be vastly better.
The delivery man completely throws off the scene. They saved a lil time and a lil money by getting some guy with a queer voice to do his part instead of simply getting some guy off the street to do a better job. (assuming it was dubbed in the US) I could get my next door neighbor to read his part better.
I could go to a store and wait for the next guy to walk in and offer him a $20.
In SotC, there is no language. They speak gibberish. No one says anything, but that's part of the style of the game, like in Ico or the Sims.
No one is so stupid as to only have Japanese dubbing with English subtitles into a modern US game. I'm fine with it as an option, but it takes me out of the game experience entirely when someone starts jabbering at me in a language I don't understand.
I watch the occassional movie with subtitles, but animation is different, especially in video games. Everything can be synced and redone quickly and easily so that dubbing a different language doesn't look nearly as awkward as it does with live action. And in my opinion, most developers do a good job of that.
You're just being way to nitpicky. I know the delivery guy in that clip was terribly done, but everything else fit. It was a teenage voice for the teenage boy, and female teenage voices for the teenage girls. They fit.
I do know perfectly well that you meant something other than what you said, but that's pretty much the point. Acknowledging that the voices you're hearing were added to the pictures and that the pictures themselves have no "original" sound at all and simultaneously acknowledging that there are ways it can be done that you are content with and then directly claiming the opposite is ridiculous. There's nothing magical about Japanese that makes it "more introspective" or whatever bullshit you want that people who don't speak the language are unlikely to pick up on anyway. If you acknowledge the existence of a good dub you can't turn around and call dubs an abomination. They can be bad, they can be good, but whether or not they are dubbed isn't even what you have a problem with. Yet that's what you express a problem with, rather than the relative calibre of the acting, the quality of sound, or personal gripes about individual voices. In other words, you're making a retarded generalization and calling you on it is exactly on-topic.
Both wrong and irrelevant. Even if it's "gibberish" you are being spoken to and that spoken language is not English. You ARE being communicated to in a language you do not understand. So, unless you have a specific hatred for Japanese, I'm going to call complete bullshit on this point of yours. If your claim is that games should have English speech instead of any other speech because it takes you out of the game, then that should include Japanese, French, Welsh, and Gibberish.
It's late and I can't remember any other examples off hand, but I am sure there are titles that have only the Japanese audio and English subtitles. A for it being "so stupid" to not have English dubs, methinks you're forgetting that it is very costly - both time-wise and monetarily - to have a script localized and re-voice acted by English speakers. Subs are very cheap comparatively. You do not represent the entire gaming public regardless of what you think so the implication that it would be economic suicide to release a game without English voice-overs is silly. And I know there are games like this but examples fail me right now. I'll find them tomorrow.
So...you don't like subtitles. I got that a few posts ago. A lot of people do, though.
I'm being nitpicky, but I'm being just as nitpicky as I want to be. I'm apparently being too nitpicky for your personal threshold of nitpickiness, but I don't care about that really. In my opinion - and I stated it was entirely subjective from the get go - the dubs of Evangelion are an unholy, sloppy mess and pretty much represent exactly why localization and everything attached to that process is a destructive thing.
Just because you don't care about the quality of voices in your games and movies and cartoons doesn't mean the rest of us have to accept things the way they are. English dubs have gotten a lot better in video games and I hope they continue to get better. There are some real shitty examples, though, even recently.
Um... I didnt say the teen boy was horrible. Just that it could be better.
Those were not two teen girls though. One is a teen girl. The other is a woman in her possibly late 20's
So even if you think one was accurate... One wasn't. Care to guess?
This is pretty much the dumbest thing I've ever seen you say here, and you have a long history of stupid posts to choose from.
First, I said exactly what I wanted to say. When referring to anime, "dubs" refers to the English dub, not the specific audio term "dub" as relates to applying voice to video. Therefore, since you undoubtedly know this, you WERE being pedantic just as I said. Henceforth, I will refer to the "English dubs" simply as "dubs" as that is the colloquial meaning when referencing this topic and it is entirely valid and correct to refer to them in this abbreviated manner.
Second, the original production of Evangelion included drawing, scripting, and voicing the product. While the pictures themselves have no voices, the original production of Evangelion did. The fact that it can be separated into various parts doesn't mean that it should be or that the original, full envisionment of the project isn't the "original" version. The original Japanese voices are the original voices and the ones closest to the original direction of the show, and thus I think they have the most "artistic significance" in relation to the project.
Third, I did not say that Japanese voices sounds more introspective than any other language. I suggested that the original voice track had Shinji sounding introspective and the English dub destroyed it. Again, this is my personal opinion of the this specific anime. Go pop in an Evangelion DVD. The original Japanese voice for Shinji is rather quiet and seemingly introspective. This has nothing to do with Japanese on the whole but this particular anime: I think the Japanese voice acting for Shinji blended well with the story and his character and I think the dub works against the nature of Shinji's character and the story.
Fourth, it is not hypocritical or incorrect to call dubs an abomination and yet acknowledge the few, very rare exceptions to the rule. Dubs are, by and large, an abomination, and the few exceptions do not, in my eyes, make it a valid pursuit. Localization is a purely economic pursuit.
Finally, I never said you weren't on-topic. I said you add no value to a topic when you post. There's a big difference between the two, VC. You always manage to stay on topic, even if you contribute zilch to it. You waste too much time making snide remarks at people that don't care. e.g. me.