Voice acting can decide whether or not a fantasy game-universe can be made believable to the incredulous kind of person who is not so inclined to dive face first into a japanese color-orgy filled to the brim with over-exaggerated dialogue and gay retards with stupid hair. For example, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain has a great story, we all know it does. But the game play can be pretty frustratingly bad at times, and I some times felt like I was aching my self through a never-ending series of slaughters, just to see some progression in the storyline. But every so often, Kain would give me a smart remark, an item description of an exceptionally vivid nature, or a comment on the foul stench that surrounded him in every city. Had this not been delivered in a good way, I would probably not have immersed myself as much in the story and potentially not realized how fucking awesome it was.
Then you get games like Baten Kaitos, which for the 15 minutes I played it, was like drilling a hole in my ears and then putting it next to a sandblaster, and then having Alanis Morisette do any of her songs on SUNN O)))’s stage sound gear. It was fucking horrendous. I don’t know how else to describe the voices, but they were really. fucking. bad.
There’s also the entire Resident Evil series, suspending that everything about it screams “you’re either a 12 year old girl or a fucking retard if you like this”, and also the fact that I love Yahtzee Croshaw, I was very disappointed by the fact that he never once mentioned how fucking bad the voice acting is in those games. Except maybe with the Villain-With-Throat-Cancer bit. I some times wake up in a cold sweat, the sounds still ringing in my ears, the flat and monotonous “cry” for help: “Leon!” It might as well have been performed by text-to-speech software from the late 90′s.
“Zombies.” She said, as if she was ordering them from a fucking drive through. And I’ve heard more convincing grunts of agony on 8mm amateur pornographic movies. That were fake.
Though I’m pretty sure everything will still suck about Resident Evil, they could at least make the actors sound like they didn’t have to pay to have their names billed on the fucking thing.
Voice acting can mean everything for a cynical realist bastard like me, because I don’t care about flashy swords that much, or the camera angle swooping in to catch a close-up of a particularly sneaky or bloody murder, or the way the bodies drop to the ground after running penis first into hail of birdshot. And I especially don’t give a shit about the fake tension between
teenage-protagonist-with-gay-hair #1 and
teenage-protagonist-named-after-a-German-Nazi-Philosopher-to-better-feign-pseudo-intellectualism-
but-ultimately-just-look-infantile-and-fucking-retarded.
I really don’t care about anything other than PLOT, CHARACTERS AND THEIR DEVELOPMENT, NARRATIVE AND DIALOGUE, unless the game is Crysis or COD4, in which case it might be worth catching that the first looks better than real life and the latter is written by a cynical bastard like myself, and in any case both Crysis and COD4 look great, and have redeeming features beyond eye-candy. And because the narrative and the dialogue should really make up a pretty big bulk of any modern video-game, it’s all the more important that it’s not done by flatulent egos and failed porn actresses who couldn’t make ends meet (harr) just being a fluffer.
Basically what I’m trying to say is, unless Capcom has found a way to perform a miracle, I’ll still hate the Resident Evil Franchise (can anyone say EA strategy) after 5 is released. Even if the voice acting has improved, which I doubt it will have
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