Voice Acting

[Vyse of Arcadia]

To me, one of the most annoying things about this console generation and the last is that it would seem almost every RPG developer woke up one morning and thought, "Wow, we have so much space! Let's voice every single line of dialog in the game, no matter how insignificant!" This has often been done without actually raising the quality of voice acting.

But it's not all bad. Some games have had really great voice acting. And that's what this thread is for. What are your favorite and least favorite games when it comes to voice acting?

Rogue Galaxy and Dragon Quest VIII easily had the best voice acting I've heard in recent memory. The VAs for the former were all spot-on, nothing short of perfect. Nothing sounded forced or awkward; everything sounded natural.Ditto for DQVIII, with the addition of British VAs. Persona 3 and 4 aren't far behind, for the same reasons (minus the Britishness). I also loved the spoken language in Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. It really went a long way towards making the game seem both more alien and more natural. Also, the Nippon Ichi strategy games have been well-voiced for the most part, as well as the Rachet and Clank games (for Captain Quark if no one else.) And before I forget, I also really enjoyed the voices in Odin Sphere, the Valkyrie Profile games, and Valkyria Chronicles.

And now for the hall of shame. Final Fantasy X got on my nerves. Some characters were really good (Wakka, Tidus, Yuna, Lulu), but my god, everyone else wasn't. Final Fantasy XII started good, but it also had unexpectedly terrible voice acting eventually. "Markwis." Grandia II was great in spots, and terrible in spots. For every time you got to listen to Elena or Millenia speaking or singing, some minor NPC would blather on for hours. Cross Edge was annoying for the sheer volume of the voice acting. The English dub gave me shivers, and the Japanese wasn't much better. Maybe if I had actually cared about the story, characters, or anything besides the gameplay... Eternal Sonata's English was also pretty terrible, but thank heavens I played it on the PS3 and could switch to Japanese.

[localflick]

That's what really impressed me about Riviera: The Promised Land for PSP, the whole game is fully voiced over, and I like the voices, though there's a lag in the umd version due to slight load times. The psn version is great.

I like the cheesy ps1 voice overs like in Grandia and Castlevania Sotn. Obviously they're far from the best, but in an odd way that's what I like about them. The original MGS voiceovers were fun too.

[Solana]

I really enjoyed some of the VA in Suikoden V. It was kind of cheesy during some of the more serious moments, but that same effect added a lot to the funny scenes.

One of my favorite examples is the cross-dressing scene. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xkdrYtFQBg&NR=1 Normally enemy soldiers are little more than cannon fodder, but here they're given some good lines and are a bit more personable. It makes this scene even more priceless.

Or this one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjuBiaER ... re=related. Adding things like seasickness can make a hero of a story a lot more human and easy to relate to.

The voice-acting in Disgaea has also been a good match, especially Etna's. Laharl always tries to sound so puffed up and mighty, and Flonne has just enough ditziness but conviction in hers to make her more likable.

[Sonic#]

I've thought that somewhat myself, that the amounts of voiced dialogue were excessive. I played Skies of Arcadia yesterday, and as Vyse knows, the only voice acting in the game occurs as short interjections, sometimes not even words but sighs or grunts. It's delightful, because you get the emotive parts, supplemented by a quickly readable text.

I think that it's sometimes cool to have lots of voiced dialogue in an RPG. It only really hurts the game in a couple of ways.
1. Not enough voice actors to do all the voices.
I'm mainly thinking of Oblivion here. You don't really notice how generic the NPCs are until they tend to speak in the same voice. The voices can be good, and it's still annoying! And often times they aren't so hot. >_>
2. Voice acting is everywhere, and the dialogue is dumbed down.
Now, I'm not opposed to making dialogue sound realistic. But where there's an emphasis on voice acting, to save the time of recording and saying lines, there's less said. This is just an impression that can be challenged, but there's more text in the earlier RPGs that don't use voice acting that much (Grandia, Skies of Arcadia, Lunar) than there are in games that use voice acting to a great extent. As someone who's more comfortable reading, and who likes to talk to a lot of NPCs multiple times, it's disappointing to have less to experience.

Rogue Galaxy and Dragon Quest VIII easily had the best voice acting I've heard in recent memory. The VAs for the former were all spot-on, nothing short of perfect. Nothing sounded forced or awkward; everything sounded natural.Ditto for DQVIII, with the addition of British VAs.

And that's because fantasy people have British voices and American English is the dialect of the futuuuuure!*

*At present. See Indian English.

[Alunissage]

As someone who's more comfortable reading, and who likes to talk to a lot of NPCs multiple times, it's disappointing to have less to experience.

Not to mention it taking more time to experience the same thing over and over. Talking to NPCs repeatedly to see if they have anything new to say and finding out that they don't is generally more time-consuming when they're voiced, and more aggravating too.

[Jenner]

As someone who's more comfortable reading, and who likes to talk to a lot of NPCs multiple times, it's disappointing to have less to experience.

Not to mention it taking more time to experience the same thing over and over. Talking to NPCs repeatedly to see if they have anything new to say and finding out that they don't is generally more time-consuming when they're voiced, and more aggravating too.

I get mad when the option is not there to subtitle the conversations. Sometimes I'm not sure what the character is saying because of background noise or interruptions.

Also, sometimes I mishear things because innuendo is fun kids.

[Vyse of Arcadia]

I get mad when the option is not there to subtitle the conversations. Sometimes I'm not sure what the character is saying because of background noise or interruptions.

That also bugs me. Lunar isn't so bad about it, but I've played games with bad sound engineering. Games in which, for no particular reason, the music and sound effects are so much louder than the vocals that you have to wonder if the sound programmers were asleep. Sonic Adventure springs to mind, which is sad, because that had the best voice acting, both English and Japanese, of all the Sonic games.

[ShindoW]

I can't recall any voice acting I've hated or disliked. I must have a strong tolerance as I feel I'm the only person to actually like Star Ocean 2's original voices lol... I admit, there were characters like Precis or Chisato who would grind on you. I used Opera all the time and she had one voice clip that made you want to claw the screen.
I've been meaning to pick up Rogue Galaxy. I swear I have the game somewhere, not sure if I have the guide for reference though.

[LuNaRtIc]

I think I mentioned in another thread that the PSP remake of Star Ocean 2 made me want to bash my skull in with its excessive voice acting. X_x And that's INCREDIBLY rare with me; I'm a voice over freak.

[Sonix]

I don't mind bad VA. I mean, I survived games like Grandia, Koudelka and Legend of Dragoon to name a few. As in matter of fact, I kinda like VA in Grandia, haha.

Of course, if possible, I'd prefer good VA like found in Tales of Vesperia and Persona 4.

[Vyse of Arcadia]

I don't mind bad VA. I mean, I survived games like Grandia, Koudelka and Legend of Dragoon to name a few. As in matter of fact, I kinda like VA in Grandia, haha.

Of course, if possible, I'd prefer good VA like found in Tales of Vesperia and Persona 4.

I actually really liked the VA in Grandia also. With a couple of exceptions (Mullen and Justin), it was fantastic. Particularly Sue.

[localflick]

I don't mind bad VA. I mean, I survived games like Grandia, Koudelka and Legend of Dragoon to name a few. As in matter of fact, I kinda like VA in Grandia, haha.

Of course, if possible, I'd prefer good VA like found in Tales of Vesperia and Persona 4.

I loved the bad VA in Koudelka! The I'm-trying-to-sound-dramatic-but-I-just-can't made it more entertaining for me. Like in the first half hour or so when  Koudelka explains that she didn't eat the soup because it was poisoned, and Edward is freaking out over it. There was an endearing quality to it.