Why was voice acting so bad in PS1 era? I mean I can understand why Japanese games had fucked up wording due to the translation. And I know the actors were generally amateurs, but they were still usually native fucking English speakers, so how is it they somehow didn't even know which words to put emphasis on?
Why was voice acting so bad in PS1 era...
Christopher Brooks
Jeremiah Edwards
Gay
Julian Peterson
They probably didn't know what the context for anything was.
Matthew Allen
But in what possible scenario would you ever think the phrase "Don't open that door" would be said "Don't OPEN that DOOR"?
Adrian Cox
I can't comment on other games, but specifically with RE, the games were dubbed in English only, and the Voice Director was Japanese, so he chose the Takes that were most pleasing to his ear as a Japanese man that didn't speak much English at all. At some points he even Frankensteined Takes together.
Blake Carter
Because this was before internet job postings and casting calls, and real actors wouldn't even consider voice acting.
So most of the voice actors, if they even really are native English speakers and not just American accents, were just completely random normalfags, not real actors. Some developer would call his one American friend over for a day to voice all the lines.
Christian Collins
with the original RE a guy from capcom specifically corrected them with line readings. A man who didn't speak English told them how to say their lines.
Ayden Richardson
Maybe they spliced the words together. Also they just took whoever signed up for the job from what I know. You showed up that day? You get to be immortalized in Resident Evil.
Blake Morales
Plus the original RE's voice actors weren't really even actors, they were primarily radio DJs and promotions people.
Matthew Moore
I recall reading something about this when a VA for One Piece died several months ago
In Japan, since the animation is already done, VAs are expected to work really hard to capture exactly how everything is said properly, in context. In the west its the opposite, voice acting is done before the animation is finished so there is little to no context and sometimes the animations are made to reflect the emotions in the VAs rather than the opposite
tl;dr
Jap VAs are actual actors and are more professional.
Carson Baker
My favorite example of this is House of the Dead, where someone will shout for you to help them by saying
>help ME, help ME
Carter Gutierrez
"LOOK OUT! IT'S A MONSTER!"
Ayden Nelson
The standards are way lower.
Aaron Mitchell
Michael Green
How could anyone do this...
Joseph Martinez
Found a link.
Every second of this video is pure gold
youtu.be
Alexander Smith
In the original RE, they couldn't even find enough white people to get actors with the right hair color. Chris and Wesker's actor's hair is just spray painted.
Easton Rogers
Beats me too...
Evan Bell
I thought he actually spliced some of the lines like said.
Samuel Green
Because back then they made games instead of movies and most of the budget went into actual game development.
Leo Evans
OH, BARRY
did she think she was reading a sex scene or something
Dominic Turner
PS1 era games don't have bad voice acting. It's specifically RE that had bad voice acting. It was already confirmed by the director that RE1 turned out the way it did is because he specifically asked the voice actors to speak extra awkwardly slow as he wasn't able to keep up with english.
Parker Edwards
True. The guy who played James Sunderland was famously just some random dude bringing his daughter to audition for Laura. And the guy who played Gabe Logan in Syphon Filter was a truck driver who's never been in anything else
Brody Wilson
fucking house of the dead. kino. there was still arcade cabinets when i was 12. fucking 1 euro to play for 6 mins because i was shit at it. man, that stuff was cool.
Jacob Anderson
Barry was just some White guy they grabbed off the street
Nathaniel Taylor
Stupid zoomer thread. 3D gaming was relatively new. Games were finally able to be more than just 2D sidescrolling platformers. 3D gaming was not established strongly yet.
Xavier Lewis
What does that have to do with voice acting.
Gavin Kelly
It's called 3D because they added the sound dimension to it.
Camden Brooks
What are you guys talking about it sounds fine to me....
Cameron Reyes
>stupid zoomer
>posts complete non-sequitur
Wow, you're fucking stupid m8.
Carter Butler
The fucking industry was still in a state of infancy in regards to 3D gaming you moronic asshat. You think movies suddenly all were to the quality of 2019 standards back in 1949? Get fucking real dude. Use your head. The money wasn't there yet for all the acting and actors you see today. A lot of them wouldn't have even cared to be apart of gaming then either.
Michael Thompson
get a MAME emulator
Jack Allen
Troll or idiot see and shut your mouth. It really isn't complicated.
Asher Reed
MY GAWD
Carson Reed
What does voice acting have to do with graphics.
Lucas Collins
Most early voice acting is just whatever devs happened to be around that day and so entirely awkward nerds.
Joseph Miller
>Why was voice acting so bad in PS1 era?
For some reason, I found it funny that certain AAA games, such as Final Fantasy series, didn't have voice acting until the PS2 era, while other ''smaller'' games had. Take Lunar, for example. Outstanding VA for its time.
Still, when it comes to ''quality'', nothing will ever top Lymle from Star Ocean 4, or this:
youtube.com
Logan Allen
This
A lot of VAs during the early-mid '90s were just company guys. And in the case of Japanese games, english-speaking staff working at Japanese companies. They basically grabbed anyone they could find who could speak english and put them in front of a mike. Snatcher is the only game from that time I can think of which went to the trouble of hiring professional english VAs and directing them.
Ryan Jones
No it really isn't which is why it's so baffling that you can't even type a coherent sentence on the topic.
Matthew Williams
WHERES MY PIZZA
Blake Ramirez
you know adventure games with complex plots and full voice acting were already a thing by that era right? having production standards wasn't a fucking magical new concept. jesus christ you're a fucking dipshit.
Isaac Torres
There were also a lot of fmv games with real actors back then.
James Long
The money was not there you morons.
Leo Ross
EXPLAIN THIS
Thomas Garcia
>nighttrap
>good voice acting
Jason Reed
Metal Gear?
Zachary Mitchell
>The fucking industry was still in a state of infancy
Blood Omen came out in the same year as Resident Evil (1996) and has better voice acting than most games made today.
Mason Evans
My favorite is in HotD 1, the reload sound.
>WEload! WEload!
Xavier Clark
oh wow, an outlier
Liam Powell
>HE is sleeping with the ULTIMATE FAILURE
I think you mean best voice acting
Brandon King
jeff luptin the voice behind Gillian Seed did other stuff too like McDonald's commercials.
youtube.com
youtube.com
Joshua Bell
>stilted and unnatural voice acting that sounds like it's straight from a 90's anime dub (which MGS essentially is)
>not bad
I mean, it was obviously far better than RE, but hardly anything worthy of praise.
Logan Perry
They didn’t have VAs for this sort of shit during the ps1 era. VA work especially for console games was unheard of for the most part and was uncharted territory to a lot of development teams who would formlerly just create awful sound midi sound clips like Kefka’s laugh.
When they recorded RE1 it was in the early-mid 90s and it was made entirely by nips. They scrabbled whatever English speaking people they could find together and barely paid them busfare to record maybe 10-20 lines of dialogue for the handful of short cutscenes where it’d be used and did so with ancient recording equipment and probably less than 1% of 1% of their small budget.
Parker Ross
Parker White
YOU GOT TO THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM.
Gabriel White
>And the guy who played Gabe Logan in Syphon Filter was a truck driver who's never been in anything else
holy shit, i really like his voice
Elijah Powell
In Resident Evil 1 specifically the Japanese VA director went full "just fuck my shit up" on the voice lines. I'm talking splicing different takes of the same sentence together randomly and giving the VAs no direction.
Add that on top of the fact that the Japanese staff probably didn't speak much english in the first place and what you have is a literal garbled mess.
Voice acting in that era could be done well, just look at Oddworld or Legacy of Kain.
Juan Foster
>literally hire people from the Screen Actor's Guild of America
>still stilted and janky as fuck
Luis Reed
There are often times in localizations when the voice actors do not get to see what the voice lines are for and they have absolutely no context on the paper. Just simply a fucking line to voice.
Kayden Watson
The people directing their performance weren't native english speakers, no context.
Samuel Ross
Even if it was bad, at least it had soul.
Liam Ortiz
The sound editors for RE1 stapled different takes of the same lines together to make it sound "cooler"
Grayson Rivera
Voice Acting wasn't important
Gavin Bell
Because it was the mid 90's
>VO tech was still in it's infancy, having voiced characters in games was still a very new concept
>Professional Actors were WELL outside realistic afforability for most devs, so they had to make do with staffers and random nobodies
>Specifically in the cases of RE and other Nip importants, localization was a major challenge since the directors rarely spoke english and the script had to be translanted from the original japanese, meaning it was made with jap inflections which sounds odd in english
If you recall when The Twin Snakes was made, they had redub the entire game because the original MGS was recorded in a hotel bathroom, and with the advances made in technology if they had used the original dub you could literally hear the traffic outside the room.
Kevin Sullivan
i want to hear Liquid Snake give his speech about Genes while a motorcycle screeches outside
Adrian White
>MGS was recorded in a hotel bathroom
Source? Because MGS was one of the few games with competent voice acting from that era.
Adam Ortiz
>The main reason for the re-recording, according to an interview with Hayter, was because the increased audio quality allowed by the GameCube picked up outside noise from the original recordings that were inaudible in the PlayStation version. In the original game, Gray Fox and Donald Anderson were both voiced by Greg Eagles. However, in The Twin Snakes, Greg Eagles voices only Anderson, whereas Gray Fox was voiced by Rob Paulsen. The revised voice acting is used in Metal Gear Solid 4 during Snake's reminiscence as the English-language voice-recording used in the original game was not recorded in a sound-proof studio.[7]
Hayter later said it was a Los Angeles hotel and they had to use the bathroom as the recording booth cause it was the only thing was relatively sound proof
Jacob Barnes
A mixture of the VAs living in Japan for a bit and the VAs having to pronounce it in a way that the Japanese directors to understand and think sounds good.
The script itself is also a bit fucked due to a shoddy translation. It gets the point across most of the time, but the wording tends to fall on the bad side of things. Like, the intention for the "It's a weapon!" line was for Barry to give you a new ammo type for the Bazooka and tell you that it's effective against non-zombie enemies like Hunters, Yawn and Tyrant. The translator messed up and made Barry sound like a retard that's giving you a weapon that has the amazing ability to harm living things, unlike any other weapon in the world. It's believed the translators had no idea of the context of the lines in the game, which is why quite a few lines sound awkward.
Grayson Lopez
There were a lot of western PS1 games that had great voice acting, even if the audio recordings themselves weren't the highest quality. The Spyro games for example sounded fine, as did Crash Bandicoot 2 and 3. They even hired pro VAs to voice characters in them, Spyro was voiced by Tom Kenny who has been in just about everything but is probably known best as the VA of Spongebob.
Austin Parker
Based