Like Riddles astutely pointed out, he and I have failed to deliver on Cheesy Voice Acting Week. Especially in comparison to our massively successful Romance Week. HOWEVER! There is one game that has voice acting that is so beyond bad that it needs to get some attention before we put this theme week behind us.
Yes, of course I’m talking about the original Baten Kaitos. I’m not going to touch the sequel/prequel because I haven’t played it, and also Riddles tells me it’s not as bad and I’ll take his word for it. THIS TIME. Anyway, Baten Kaitos was a strange beast as it’s one of the few RPGs that I beat and enjoyed almost purely for its battle system. The environments were gorgeous, but the scenes were boring, poorly directed, and the character models looked pretty bad, and this was when the voice acting was turned off. And oh dear GOD, was that option ever a requirement for me to beat this game. To continue here, dear readers, I need to clear up something. Although I’ll constantly rag on bad voice acting, the truth is that while I’m playing the game, I can usually set aside my issues for the sake of getting into the experience and complain about it later. I prefer to enjoy a game while I’m playing it rather than let one aspect ruin the whole thing for me. However, Baten Kaitos delivers something truly astounding with its voice performances – every one is terrible. I typically prefer some form of voice acting to text, but I couldn’t handle it this time. I thought maybe it was just miserable dialogue, but when I finally turned off the voice acting, I found that – while still not great – the words were greatly improved without voices. I no longer wanted to punch Xelha in the throat, and Savyna became hot again. In essence, the game became playable. So after I finally made that decision, I would play for a few hours and then I would begin to wonder why I turned the voices off. “It can’t be THAT bad,” I would think, “I was probably over-reacting”. So because the scenes were just static shots with talking heads, I stupidly would decide to turn the voice acting back on. Of course, the moment I had access to the menu again, I would rectify that grave error.
This is Kalas realizing that he has to LIVE with his voice.
The pattern would surprisingly continue. I ACTUALLY couldn’t believe that the voice acting was that bad. It would prove me wrong every time. But because you can’t switch the option during cutscenes, I had to sit through some particularly awful, and frankly embarrassing voice work. I mean, I understand that in many cases the voice actors don’t have a director, other actors to play off of, or even a basic understanding of the context of their lines, but still! C’mon man! This game is unbelievable. And this was in an age when terrible voice acting was becoming far less common. Anyway, that’s all I got, suck it.
