Has voice acting ever made or broken a game for you?

[MaxwellGT2000]

A203D said:

MaxwellGT2000 said:

It has broken the experience of Final Fantasy from X on... it has made games such as Half-Life 2 and Portal 1&2.

Generally localizing Japanese games is not taken seriously any old voice actor will do and it ruins the story, even if it was originally well written, there will be poor translations and the actors treat it as such. 

I havent played Portal 2 (planning to get it), but i agree some games have had steller voice work that has made the game a lot better.

i think FF10 had okay voice work, not great but not bad either, there were some really low moments and some good moments. and i think this trend is evident in Japanese games, so the voice acting can sometimes be really poor, but i think its also down to bad writing or translation - some of the lines are things you would never hear anyone say even in a childrens cartoon.

however i think FF12 and Dragon Quest 8 had some excellent voice acting, some of the best in any game i've ever played. and that was also because the lines were believable. imo the English voice acting in FF12 and DQ8 made the game, the writing, the maturaity of the dialogue, the beleivable tone of the actors made those performances phenominal imho.

I've seen better voice acting in the PS1 era over FFX.  FFXII while having a much better translation anyone with a good ear can tell that whoever produced the voice acting didn't know what they were doing as one person would sound like he's in a room that echoes, while another sounds like he's too far from the mic, and only one seems like it was done right... and this is a conversation going on between the people, so they don't even sound like they're in the same room... and that's just like taking nails to a chalk board to me.

DQ8 does have good voice acting, I really don't know how that was done right and FFXII which came after and took longer, was done wrong on the production end, the only thing I can think of is that Dragon Quest games are usually tended to with a bit more care than the FF series now-a-days, and Level 5 makes the DQ games so that might be apart of it too.