Awful English VA for Kiryu

[Polysorbate]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPYeESdKbbI

One more horrendous reason to not play with the English dub. He's even got that signature Californian "huff" at the end of every sentence when he's trying to sound edgy.

What was the reasoning on this? "Hiring a white guy to portray a Japanese man again would be racist, so instead we'll hire a Korean because... uh, those people are all basically the same I guess?"

Sega has one franchise that's not perennially on fire and this is the treatment it gets.

[Stevey The Ex-Eevee]

Originally posted by Renegade:

I hate when people ♥♥♥♥♥ about someone playing another race, swear that just shows the racist you actually are, who gives a ♥♥♥♥ if its the same race as long as the portrayal was good, haven't heard his lines yet however, and tbh, yongyea is Korean, not white, just a FYI

because acting is... acting in the role you're playing. surprising, i know, but the colour of your skin should never factor into this, you should be hiring the best person for the role, not someone that matches the role of the fictional character.

[TheShadowHatter]

Originally posted by retsa2b:

Originally posted by TheShadowHatter:

Yeah but I don't know if anybody has ever tackled a guy who specifically ONLY speaks Japanese and force the AI to make him speak English.

It works better than you'd think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h6jPfe2NxI

Granted, the character of Kiryu is practically idealized for the unavoidably kind-of-dry delivery you'll be getting from pure AI generation. But hey, it works out, right? I'm convinced we'll see this specific mod not long after launch. You can predict in advance that moments involving legit emotion or singing won't go down too great. Personally, I wouldn't mind a simple impromptu switch to the Japanese dialogue whenever the AI truly can't deliver.

(Note that the guy who generated the dialogue provided incorrect text in several instances.)

NO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ WAY! I wasn't expecting someone to finally do it. I absolutely love it even if it's a bit stiff. You can honestly hear the "AH" that Kuroda does in parts of this ENG AI it's pretty funny but also cool as hell. Honestly I think if people are skilled enough, they could maybe misspell certain words to force the AI to speak in a way that matches certain emotions or maybe some other techniques that AI voice have (idk anything about it personally). Needless to say I'm actually hyped seeing that clip and I'm hopeful they keep working on it. As for Karaoke I wish someone would just make a mod to make all the ENG Dub Karaoke use the original Japanese voices instead. NEVER have I enjoyed ENG Dub Karaoke it always sounds terrible and cringe.

[retsa2b]

Originally posted by TheShadowHatter:

You can honestly hear the "AH" that Kuroda does in parts of this ENG AI it's pretty funny but also cool as hell.

Honestly, I was pretty taken aback at how good it was. For an effort that has all the appearances of being done on a very quick whim, it's remarkable. I can only assume the guy actually fed a lot of Kuroda's dialogue to the AI.

Japanese doesn't have a lot of the vowels/consonances we nonetheless do hear in that short clip. The "r", "ə" and "l" in "grateful" being solid cases in point. The AI found them somewhere. The way he says "there" at the end of "isn't there?" is suspect, and more in line with my expectations.

I'd say I'm tempted to do the mod myself, but the reality is that you cannot get something like that done without spoiling more or less the whole game in the process. The mods I do make already spoil enough. And anyway, I won't be playing English on my first run. It's not something that demands a huge amount of skill or effort, and that's why I expect somebody to do it. Because after all... I can scarcely think of another game that will more desperately need this. Maybe Fallout 4? My only worry is that the first person to tackle it might end up doing a poor job, but because there's already a mod that's 90% good enough, nobody else will step in to correct it.

[Punished Rusty Shackleford]

Originally posted by Moon Rabbit:

Originally posted by Punished Rusty Shackleford:

can you just use the japanese track with subs, i refuse to listen to this guys nasally voice. i can hear him complaining about loot boxes just by looking at him.

13 minute rant about Stadia.

Repeats the same sh!t but uses different words so he can stretch the length of his videos to get more adrolls.

Then again he reads kotaku articles so they dont get my ad clicks.

[Moon Rabbit]

Originally posted by retsa2b:

Originally posted by TheShadowHatter:

Yeah but I don't know if anybody has ever tackled a guy who specifically ONLY speaks Japanese and force the AI to make him speak English.

It works better than you'd think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h6jPfe2NxI

Granted, the character of Kiryu is practically idealized for the unavoidably kind-of-dry delivery you'll be getting from pure AI generation. But hey, it works out, right? I'm convinced we'll see this specific mod not long after launch. You can predict in advance that moments involving legit emotion or singing won't go down too great. Personally, I wouldn't mind a simple impromptu switch to the Japanese dialogue whenever the AI truly can't deliver.

(Note that the guy who generated the dialogue provided incorrect text in several instances.)

Oh my god, that's actually really good. Singing is hit or miss depending on the voice. Hearing Eric Cartman sing Evanescence for instance is wild.

[Moon Rabbit]

Originally posted by Punished Rusty Shackleford:

Originally posted by Moon Rabbit:

13 minute rant about Stadia.

Repeats the same sh!t but uses different words so he can stretch the length of his videos to get more adrolls.

Then again he reads kotaku articles so they dont get my ad clicks.

Dude takes padding to a whole new level. I'm surprised he doesn't just slow his videos down, like x0.8 times. Like a taxi driver that under-inflates their tires for more rotations. Y.Y. can turn a 30 second blurb about Bioware into a 12 minute video, it's uncanny.

[TheShadowHatter]

I just realized why that AI voice surprised me and sounded so good. Kuroda AI in English legit sounds like KEITH DAVID! Man if RGG could afford Keith David to voice Kiryu we'd be set for life.

[Rabbit]

Originally posted by TheShadowHatter:

I just realized why that AI voice surprised me and sounded so good. Kuroda AI in English legit sounds like KEITH DAVID! Man if RGG could afford Keith David to voice Kiryu we'd be set for life.

I don't think Keith would be particularly hard to get, but maybe they didn't consider him

[LGravy]

Originally posted by TheShadowHatter:

I just realized why that AI voice surprised me and sounded so good. Kuroda AI in English legit sounds like KEITH DAVID! Man if RGG could afford Keith David to voice Kiryu we'd be set for life.

Finally, somebody who agrees with me (well, regarding getting Sir David to be the new English Uncle Kaz anyway, as I've yet to hear English AI Kuroda)!

Originally posted by Boon: Safeword:

I don't think Keith would be particularly hard to get, but maybe they didn't consider him

Aye, considering that not only is Daniel Dae Kim gonna appear in Infinite Wealth's dub as new villain Masataka Ebina, but Sega also got Danny Trejo's likeness to be used for new baddie Dwight Méndez's face, AND Danny's gonna be voicing his character in said dub, too.

[Ryu]

Idk, Yong Yea sounds fine to me, maybe a little young for Kiryu, though. Still, I'm not gonna lie, Darryl Kurylo was much better, that's a fact.

By the way, I'm a non-native English speaker, also linguist and I'm interested in hearing native's opinions. Why exactly is he that bad at voice acting? Is his intonation seems to be the problem? Accent, perhaps? Word stress? Something else?

I'm too lazy to read all the 4 pages of replies, can anyone shortly summarize?

Edit: K guys, understandable enough. It's a shame Darryl hadn't come back
Edit2: Appreciate the Jester award, I still took someone's points lol. But for real, go easy on Yong, I'm sure he will improve

[Beef]

i might not have high standards, but kiryu's VA in this is alright, when i first heard the one single clip we had i thought it was gonna suck, but then i play the game and its not a horrible dub

i'll prolly still play this and infinite wealth in dub, cuz i like *understanding what they're saying without looking at the bottom 10% of the screen*

[Punished Rusty Shackleford]

Will there be or is there already a mod to remove YongYeas voice and replaced with a better one made with AI?

[Ryu]

Originally posted by Belle Delphine Targaryen!:

Some say Yong was merely chosen because of his status as a famous Youtuber.

I mean, yeah, his status definitely helped him.

In all honesty, he sounds fine, but he definitely has to work on his pronunciation. When I hear Kuroda speaking, dude's speech is crystal clear, I can hear every syllable, every phonem in it. He even nails word stress to express character's emotions, such as anger or confusion.

Yong sounds kinda insecure in his toughness, let alone he often straight up mumbles. He'll do much better once he gains more experience with voice acting, that's all I'm saying, guy has potential

[retsa2b]

Originally posted by Moon Rabbit:

Oh my god, that's actually really good. Singing is hit or miss depending on the voice. Hearing Eric Cartman sing Evanescence for instance is wild.

AI singing is not done the same way as Kuroda's voice in that clip.

In the clip, a guy has fed text prompts to an AI trained on Kuroda's voice and the AI has spat out complete audio clips based on nothing but that text and an understanding of how English is spoken. For music, somebody takes the karaoke (singing-only) track of a song and feeds that to an AI trained on somebody's voice. The important difference is that in the latter case, the performance of the singing is 100% dependent on the performance of whoever originally sang the song.

So let the ramifications sink in. It means that it would be Kuroda's voice but YongYea's terrible Autotuned "Crash Test Dummies" performance.

[retsa2b]

Originally posted by Ryu:

Yong sounds kinda insecure in his toughness, let alone he often straight up mumbles. He'll do much better once he gains more experience with voice acting, that's all I'm saying, guy has potential

I am 99% confident he has already recorded all of his dialogue for Infinite Wealth and I CANNOT WAIT to make fun of his tendency to end almost every sentence with an exhale. In his mind, that equals "tough guy." It's going to be glorious.