The english voice acting

[Lokaror]

I seriously have a hard time understanding how a good portion of the english voice acting got through what i assume is a decent amount of people, and then got into the game.

Seriously, Bryce in particular is so bad! So so bad! Like, i have japanese audio on just for the very reason that i know this is an issue when you make a game in one language. It's why i have subs on for everything i can and hate dubs, because its almost always so unnatural. So why do we have such bad voice acting for so much of the english speaking. I understand that when i switch it to japanese, i'm getting mostly japanese. But i'd rather have the entire game be in japanese if this is how they are going to try and have any of it in English. Such a horrible fumble. This is the first yakuza game I've had such glaring obvious issues with.

[Kapika96]

Agreed. Bryce's voice is absolutely atrocious.

Roman was odd with it sounding like two completely different voice actors for when he switches between English and Japanese but that's way better than Bryce!

Tomizawa supposedly being American yet having rubbish English pronunciation is pretty immersion breaking too.

[Clemency5th]

We need a mod that when using the Japanese audio, all the broken English is switched with the English dub voices only. The chapter 2 Japnese audio English was so bad that I've switched to English dub for the rest of my playthrough. I think Ichiban's and Chitose's voice actors in the English dub are really good and have carried my playthrough so far.

[Metal Izanagi]

Some of the characters who are supposed to speak both English and Japanese have some questionable English to say the least, yeah. Like...Tomizawa is American,(Heck, his first name is Eric!) and he just happens to also speak Japanese. His English is worse than Kiryu's English, though! Dude literally would not have been able to finish elementary school with English that difficult to understand.

Then you get Roman who speaks Japanese like someone who was born and raised there, but when he speaks English he suddenly gets a very American accent because he's clearly got a different voice actor doing the English lines.

[Skeeka]

The few engrish speaking lines are far and few between.

Other characters like Jeff and Roman have the complete voice actor switch which is fine, if a bit jarring and tbh...I assume the voice actors you hear in those english speaking bits are the same as in the full english dub? If that's the case then there's no way I could listen to a full dub of that.

[Sombrero]

You guys are way overexaggerating lmao. A) it's not the biggest studio on the planet I can imagine they have a fairly limited budget for localization and voice acting and B) the actors are doing a pretty phenomenal job across the board honestly.

I think the main issue with this game is that they chose to put non english speaking characters in an english speaking country and everybody magically speak the same language with about the same accent.

It's a writing issue first and foremost, not a localization/voice acting issue. I feel they should have either make a new cast with everybody speaking english (or having very few non english speaking characters), find a story reason for the cast to learn to speak english or just not set the game partly in america.

It's still fun to play but it's super jarring when sometimes the language barrier is an issue and most of the time it's not. It's super inconsistent and nonsensical to no end. But that's in 0 fault due to the voice acting whatsoever.

[Kapika96]

Originally posted by Sombrero:

You guys are way overexaggerating lmao. A) it's not the biggest studio on the planet I can imagine they have a fairly limited budget for localization and voice acting and B) the actors are doing a pretty phenomenal job across the board honestly.

I think the main issue with this game is that they chose to put non english speaking characters in an english speaking country and everybody magically speak the same language with about the same accent.

It's a writing issue first and foremost, not a localization/voice acting issue. I feel they should have either make a new cast with everybody speaking english (or having very few non english speaking characters), find a story reason for the cast to learn to speak english or just not set the game partly in america.

It's still fun to play but it's super jarring when sometimes the language barrier is an issue and most of the time it's not. It's super inconsistent and nonsensical to no end. But that's in 0 fault due to the voice acting whatsoever.

Nah, some of the voice acting is just ♥♥♥♥. It's not a writing issue. People don't magically pronounce things correctly if you write it differently.

It would've been better if they'd just done it all in Japanese and ignored the English entirely. Plenty of games go that route and while it's not perfect it's better than this! If they wanted to go for a different language in a different setting they should've invested fully into it and got actors that can actually speak the language rather than the half-arsed approach they used.

[Lokaror]

Originally posted by Sombrero:

You guys are way overexaggerating lmao. A) it's not the biggest studio on the planet I can imagine they have a fairly limited budget for localization and voice acting and B) the actors are doing a pretty phenomenal job across the board honestly.

I think the main issue with this game is that they chose to put non english speaking characters in an english speaking country and everybody magically speak the same language with about the same accent.

It's a writing issue first and foremost, not a localization/voice acting issue. I feel they should have either make a new cast with everybody speaking english (or having very few non english speaking characters), find a story reason for the cast to learn to speak english or just not set the game partly in america.

It's still fun to play but it's super jarring when sometimes the language barrier is an issue and most of the time it's not. It's super inconsistent and nonsensical to no end. But that's in 0 fault due to the voice acting whatsoever.

Go listen to bryce and come back and say this with a straight face. His voice acting is almost offensive with how bad it is. I agree it should have been all in japanese. Because i cannot believe i paid the money i did with how godawful some of the voice actors are. I dont care if their budget is limited, they can just not do english voice acting. Overexaggerating i am not.

Like Kapik said above me, they should have either done it in all japanese or not half assed it. The issue is it is a voice acting issue. Like i said in my post there were many different times they could have stopped these voices from being in game. From writing the game, conceding to they could have just not had english voice acting, getting good english voice actors when they were committed and finally having someone look at it and say "this is not acceptable for a full price game" and going back and getting good voice acting.

[Gluttony]

Originally posted by Sombrero:

You guys are way overexaggerating lmao. A) it's not the biggest studio on the planet I can imagine they have a fairly limited budget for localization and voice acting and B) the actors are doing a pretty phenomenal job across the board honestly.

I think the main issue with this game is that they chose to put non english speaking characters in an english speaking country and everybody magically speak the same language with about the same accent.

It's a writing issue first and foremost, not a localization/voice acting issue. I feel they should have either make a new cast with everybody speaking english (or having very few non english speaking characters), find a story reason for the cast to learn to speak english or just not set the game partly in america.

It's still fun to play but it's super jarring when sometimes the language barrier is an issue and most of the time it's not. It's super inconsistent and nonsensical to no end. But that's in 0 fault due to the voice acting whatsoever.

Gotta say I 100% agree with everyone else as well. I would've preferred annny other solution compared to how incredibly awful the English voice lines are for Bryce when playing in Japanese. I agree with the sentiment that I don't blame the voice actor, but HONESTLY there were a lot of easy solutions to this.

1: He's literally a white dude, you don't have to make him speak Japanese at all. Just get a native English speaker or one of the 100% English voice actors that you've clearly already hired to read his lines as well.

2: Less perfect but I would've honestly preferred splitting between a native Japanese or Native English reader to handle their respective lines over the current state.

3: They could've done the entire game in Japanese and I would not have been particularly bothered by it. I can very quickly rationalize that saying "well it makes sense to do it this way for the sake of convenience." Not uncommon for English or Japanese movies to be entirely dubbed in one language regardless of setting for the sake of the audience that's watching it.

Literally anything but this tbh. The part that pains me is that the terrible reads are on such badass lines sometimes but it's absolutely impossible to stay in the moment.

[Metal Izanagi]

Originally posted by Gluttony:

Originally posted by Sombrero:

You guys are way overexaggerating lmao. A) it's not the biggest studio on the planet I can imagine they have a fairly limited budget for localization and voice acting and B) the actors are doing a pretty phenomenal job across the board honestly.

I think the main issue with this game is that they chose to put non english speaking characters in an english speaking country and everybody magically speak the same language with about the same accent.

It's a writing issue first and foremost, not a localization/voice acting issue. I feel they should have either make a new cast with everybody speaking english (or having very few non english speaking characters), find a story reason for the cast to learn to speak english or just not set the game partly in america.

It's still fun to play but it's super jarring when sometimes the language barrier is an issue and most of the time it's not. It's super inconsistent and nonsensical to no end. But that's in 0 fault due to the voice acting whatsoever.

Gotta say I 100% agree with everyone else as well. I would've preferred annny other solution compared to how incredibly awful the English voice lines are for Bryce when playing in Japanese. I agree with the sentiment that I don't blame the voice actor, but HONESTLY there were a lot of easy solutions to this.

1: He's literally a white dude, you don't have to make him speak Japanese at all. Just get a native English speaker or one of the 100% English voice actors that you've clearly already hired to read his lines as well.

2: Less perfect but I would've honestly preferred splitting between a native Japanese or Native English reader to handle their respective lines over the current state.

3: They could've done the entire game in Japanese and I would not have been particularly bothered by it. I can very quickly rationalize that saying "well it makes sense to do it this way for the sake of convenience." Not uncommon for English or Japanese movies to be entirely dubbed in one language regardless of setting for the sake of the audience that's watching it.

Literally anything but this tbh. The part that pains me is that the terrible reads are on such badass lines sometimes but it's absolutely impossible to stay in the moment.

In one of Bryce's lines he outright pronounces the word "please" as "prease" because of a well-known difference in sounds between the two languages.

I'm not saying the actor is bad because of this of course; I'm saying RGG Studio should have had someone familiar with both languages go over both voice tracks to make sure things lined up.

Bryce is a white dude who sounds like he learned so much Japanese that he forgot he's American, and Tomizawa's grasp of English wouldn't have gotten him out of elementary school on Hawaii.