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Thank you very much for the kind comments. Wish Steam forums had a simple +1 for posts :)
That said, regarding an earlier comment about Larsa. I don't really care for his Japanese voice done by a woman.
It isn't JUST the fact that Larsa's voice is done by a woman instead of a man since the character themselves is male. English Larsa with a male voice is done perfectly fine and sounds young and yet just deep enough that you know they've hit puberty. This is a character who is coming into his own and is no longer a child. A child would be intimidated by Vayne and not be willing to stand up to him like Larsa did later on.
Balthier always had a 'mysterious' past so the revelation that he was Archadian isn't a huge thing and his English accent and voice acting has nothing to do with 'outing' him. Not everyone in Archadia is evil since you literally go to the city itself and see how miserable the poor people are there. It is reminiscent (briefly) of Avatar: The Last Airbender where Aang and crew hide out and masquerade as Fire Nation kids and Aang goes to their school and learns about them. They are not all evil. They just have a bad leader. And Aang takes care of that in the best way that he knew how.
In another example, James from Pokemon (first gen) is found to be a rich kid that was to be married to a Jessie-lookalike but ran off to join Team Rocket instead. He has a 'proper' refined accent but that detail about his life is completely unknown until that episode is seen.
The thing with Goku being voiced by a woman really shows just how utterly ear-bleeding terrible it is to me. Some people adore it by blind loyalty to the Japanese language, but my subjective ears cannot STAND any of the Japanese voice cast of DB Super because of it. Goku screeches like some hyperactive chipmunk/squirrel hybrid and it is REALLY bad. Like unbelieveably bad. Someone should've replaced this person with a proper male voice actor a long time ago but nobody is willing to do it. Goku is a male adult and deserves a male voice actor. But Japan I guess. Oh whelp.
Larsa is a 12 year old male, but just go onto YouTube and find any America's Got Talent video and you'll see that 12 years old does not mean 'sounds like a girl'. It is a deep disservice to Larsa's character to have a Japanese female voice actress that doesn't have the talent to do Larsa justice. Same with almost all of the other Japanese actors in FF12. They lack the vocal talent and training to do their characters justice, instead falling back on typical anime tropes and voices.
Hell they probably should've switched Larsa and Penelo for voice actresses and the Penelo one might've done Larsa a bit better ;)
I described it earlier. Tone, inflection, depth, weight, and a bit of heart when doing voice acting. It separates the pros from the amateurs.
Lara Croft (in the reboot) is 'gasping' because she's out of breath from fighting for her life every other damn minute. I personally didn't like the whole schadenfreude approach to the new Lara but there ya go. It worked for them so I can't blame em.
As far as Ashe, her constant gasping is possibly due to the required ADR lip-synching with the Japanese animations[www.usgamer.net]. Because redoing them to fit different languages would (apparently) cost too much and it is better to not only force the localizers to deal with both text AND voice acting but to have all the voice-work done in barely 8 weeks of work.
Big kudos on both English localizers for pushing past the 'curious' crap that the Japanese staff wanted to push on them for their unconventional voice acting choices. Glad they were able to convince Squeenix JP to see reason and not interfere in the localization process too much. Really happy they cast a youthful male for Larsa instead of an adult woman like the low-budget anime-esque voices of the JP voices did.
This is the truth right here. But my personal favorite is Dr. Cid, with Vayne and Gabranth tied for a close second.
Bonus video for Ashe lovers and haters alike. I admit its hilarious xD
"Slap"
I loled so much
Formal, sure. Overly dignified. But prude?
It still isn't without its problems. Fran was controversial even within the dev team, for example, and is VERY different from her Japanese version - even more so than, say, Kimahri was in FFX. I personally also object to the whole British accent thing on all Imperials, because it raises certain questions (such as why nobody seems to notice certain characters are, like, super obviously Archadian) and introduces a distinction between the Empire and everyone else that isn't present in the original that way.
Then there's also the quality issue, with the English voices being noticeably worse quality due to production problems when they were recorded.
Aside from the voices, there's also the issue of the translation. I love Alex O. Smith, great guy, met him in person, very skilled translator. But as a translator myself, I feel that XII is just going a little too far with the creativity. Granted, it's so full of subtleties that are nigh-on impossible to accurately convey that it's a daunting task; but going all pentameter on things and flinging accents left and right is, in my book, simply straying too far from the source. I don't know how I would have done it differently (and I certainly am not paid to think about it), but I am just not all that satisfied with the end result. In terms of translation (discounting the actual voice performances), I find X and X-2 a lot better. Some of the best game translations I've ever seen, actually.
Professional side-effects. I married a translator, so I know exactly what you're talking about (the fun/useful bit is, between the two of us, both languages have native level, so that's always helpful). It really can be nigh-impossible to convey certain things in other languages (and our language pair is not even close to as complex as Japanese). It's always a difficult line to walk to let go of the source text enough to convey the meaning behind the words instead of the words themselves, yet still remain true to the source. And that's before any nuancing/tweaking happens.