At 5/29/25 10:44 AM, nji69 wrote:Hey good question. I don't really care to bring up dub quality in general but here's an interesting little fact that might shine a bit of light on the subject:

Japanese games are inherently tied in with the English language, and have been since the days of arcades where their goofy 4000 character alphabet was difficult to put into games due to memory limitations and resolutions. You could reasonably simplify this to some extent, like utilizing the basic alphabet, but even then the 50-at-minimum characters would still take up space, and at the time there wasn't really that many important things to read. So, arcade games were mostly in English. Then following suit, a lot of game menus ended up in English, such as an intro screen saying PRESS START instead of スタート押して or something like that. Basically there's a lot more English than you think.

I assume this may have carried on to voice acting as well, because there's more than a few Japanese games that do not have Japanese voice acting. At all. Notably, Capcom's older games have a whole lot of this. It stretches from being basic (like Street Fighter having an English-speaking announcer) to extreme (Devil May Cry and Resident Evil, among others, having purely English voice acting despite being story-heavy)

I won't say this creates bad voice acting, people not caring creates bad voice acting and a whole lot of people did not and continue not to care, but it does seem to create an odd candence that the voice actors speak in. They're essentially adopting bizzare exaggerated Japanese mannerisms but in English. Comes across as very natural if you're used to it but if you've no idea what such a thing is like it might come across as offputting or bad, and nobody'll think to change it because who the hell would waste money on two English dubs of the same game?

I think some modern games still do this but in a much more clever way. The first Dark Souls at least also had a purely English voice cast but they let a good translation company take the reigns and told them to make something that sounded more natural in English since unlike the previous examples it wasn't meant to have comedic tones in it.