Very cute, but they can sound awful...
Yes, I may have just listed Jack and Ridley as a couple that just barely didn’t make Riddlethos’ Top Five Romance Hits last week, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t completely rail off on the voice acting for the game that their romance takes place in. Radiata Stories was a random buy for me. I think I was still relatively new to the PS2 world, and so I was greedily buying everything that looked like a half-decent RPG. I got lucky with Radiata Stories as it is a fun and sweet tale with some really intriguing mechanics if I can remember correctly. I never actually beat the game. I was going up that stupid maze thing at the end when some sand or something shot me back down to the bottom. I promptly said “fuck this” and never beat it. I think I eventually watched both endings on YouTube. Anyway, loved the game at the time. I went back to replay it, and while it didn’t hook me in the same way, my feelings weren’t particularly soured, I just put it down fairly soon after I started.
But back to the voice acting! I did some research almost 4 months ago for an old article for Lusipurr.com. I was shocked. I watched probably close to an hour of cutscenes, and I couldn’t believe the performances. I didn’t remember thinking that it had bad voice acting, and while some of it was the pacing of the scenes, the vast majority of the actors were terrible. Perhaps because it was a wacky comedic game most of the time, the direction was to go over the top. But not only is the game ultimately darker than a lot of games that try to be dark, but one of the first rules of good comedy is to commit to the scene. If the people are believable, the ridiculous things will seem more ridiculous! Instead, there’s just a lot of terrible over-acting. Anyway, that’s one rant about yet another great game with really disappointing voice acting (save the expected exceptions)
Tags: Radiata Stories
I tend to associate bad voice acting with Tales games, so I’m surprised you’ve picked RS as the first example.
And no mention of House of the Dead? Or, even better, House of the Dead: Overkill?
Nah, I’m trying to go with examples that attempt to be good. None of the classic Resident Evil shit this week.
And Tales can have some crap *coughLLOYDcough*, but I think there are far more prominent examples. RS being one of them.