dubbing?

[Mikari]

I forgot something damn it!

I'm 100% sure PSU has refrences to Gundam SEED which won't translate well. All through PS there has been little hints laying around.. and as you can see the name of a series links with the name of the baddies.. It's not uncommon in Japan for voice actors to make inside jokes in the native scripts. In the edits these inside jokes totally go missing..

For example in a recent series a character fell in love with a girl called Stellar. In a game he acted for 6 months later they had a side character called Stellar and he screamed her name in the exact way as the series.. Maybe a minor detail but an inside joke which 2 different people could not pull off accurately..

So again as you see. The "big picture" remains the same. But the little picture is lost.

Last edit then bed..

I don't speak Japanese. I speak a very broken version of Japanese which is more or less on par with the "Flied Lice" jokes we hear about Asians. But I do understand enough to be able to listen to things or watch them raw and catch the drift of what's being said.. Which means I can understand the context and tones of voice (remember words in Japanese can have several meanings depending on when said and the tone of voice). In this way I would "need" subs, but I would get more of the story with the original language and subs than I would with a dub in English.

I can see what you're saying "It's an action game, I just want to play not read". But I personally think games are like films. When you dub them you lose something. Even if you give a perfect translation something is still missing.. People would never go "wow that statue's just too Asian looking, we should resculpt it's eyes" or "Wow that pictures got too much blue, we should replace some of it with red". I believe the same applies to games. If I put years of my life into a game and got it perfect I wouldn't like someone cutting out 50% of it and replacing it with something else. I'd like them to keep everything possible while giving just whats needed for others to enjoy it. In this way I believe it's not a positive thing to dub games even if I can understand the context that it's done with..

I mean when you look at the 360's disc space and consider they had to translate PSU any way, why the hell doesn't it have a Japanese audio option? I really like the look of PSU and if it had a Japanese audio option on the 360 version I would of bought a 360 just to play it that way (even though I have very little intrest in anything but the wii nextgen wise). As it is I'm debating if it's even worth getting the PS2 version when I'm going to want to skip the entire story and turn off battle sounds purely so I don't have to listen to some poor ass voice acting (after hearing Shadow The hedgehog I don't trust Sega with voice acting any more).

So yea.. I can see your view point and that's fine and cool. But to me it's just not an option I would like to take. I'd always feel I was taking 3 steps forward and 2 back in terms of understanding relationships between characters.

Slight note : I do play games in complete japanese and get by perfectly fine. But I don't have a chipped PS2 which obviously isn't a great option. Not to mention I only read Katakana (names, foreign words alphabet) not Hiragana (main Japanese words alphabet) or Kanji (single symbols which are commonly used for things like "items" "weapons" "attack" "defence" and attack names not in Katakana.. hence really rather important.. except there are thousands of them and I read all of 0). So as you can see, it makes my life more difficult to get the game as I want when theres no reason at least 1 version (the PC version could of done it to, but I run linux so that's not an option unless we see a port.. which I doubt we will).

P.S. Insightful 7th post? pfft! Why make a post that isn't worth reading? I'm not a rapid fanboy, I just don't like things edited and perfer to support/avoid things which I don't morally agree with.

[pink]

Here's another person who could contest Nomad at making essay-like posts.

As has been said, there's no option to change the language settings. I imagine they did this because... all those audio files for the voice acting would probably have made the game 12GB instead of 10. XD The game is simply massive enough as is.

In-game, there's English voice actors and English sub-titles at all times. The English voice actors aren't bad at all. Could use a touch more enthusiasm, but they're certainly a lot better then many of the voice actors I've heard in other games. Ethan's voice couldn't be better really... he is a dork, and he SOUNDS like a dork.

[Mirinee]

I think I agree with everything you've said!

I'm also from the land called Eng (LOL!!) and I don't know any Japanese beyond the English words written in Katakana, and I also prefer subbed animation/games over dubbed.

Regarding the problem of 'lost in translation', apart from in-jokes/puns/the '-sama' things you mentioned which are hard to avoid in perfect translations, too often, the translators feel the need of doing the 'that picture has too much blue, we should replace some of it with red'. Unnecessary name changes (Noah/Lutz in Phantasy Star game), reinvented/added dialogue (Chihiro's last sentence in the anime Spirited Away), complete changes of voices (your TOS examples), unnecessary and story-line disrupting cuts (Card Captor Sakura anime)..., we've seen them all!
(Repeating the points you made xD.)

I don't really have a problem with accents, but I don't like how American voice actors always have to over-exaggerate voices to be recognised as a good voice actor. Japanese voice actors make the characters seem more real.

XD I can immediately think of an example of when a Japanese voice actor screams well: the character Tsukasa's voice actor in the anime .hack//SIGN. Some of the dubbed screams just hurt my ears.

I didn't know that was the reason why Advent Children was delayed, but I congratulate them for redoing the mouth animations. Maybe I'll watch it one day, (says me, who hasn't even completed any FF game and know only a few FF characters by name and appearance from the hype).

I want every game released to have the soundtracks/subtitles of every language it is released in--an international version, if you like. Then we would have the choice, and everyone would be happy. It's only a few more Gigabytes, and what's that these days, it's 2006 already!

As for PSU, we shall see what we shall see. Quite a few people are saying that Ethan sounds "not what they dreaded him to sound like"... I guess I should be grateful that it's even being released in UK. There are things that I just can't take for granted anymore. =P

[Faulkie]

(after hearing Shadow The hedgehog I don't trust Sega with voice acting any more).

Hmm you have a point there, Vector's voice made me want to cry.

And it seems a bit weird that you'd know katakana and not hirigana. It's the other way round for me. Isn't that the way people usually learn? Having said that, once you know the katakana alphabet the words are dead easy to understand (ba-na-na... what's that? ). And as for kanji... I only know basic stuff like "school" and "child"... unlikely to come up in PSU really.

[Mikari]

Hmm you have a point there, Vector's voice made me want to cry.

And it seems a bit weird that you'd know katakana and not hirigana. It's the other way round for me. Isn't that the way people usually learn? Having said that, once you know the katakana alphabet the words are dead easy to understand (ba-na-na... what's that? ). And as for kanji... I only know basic stuff like "school" and "child"... unlikely to come up in PSU really.

I'm self taught. I play a lot of turn based RPGs in Japanese (think Final fantasy tactics), so when I see a unit I don't reconise I translate the name. Makes more sense to me any way

Vectors voice wasn't THAT bad.. the point is they hired the 4kids actors so the "Sonic brand" was all the same. Which means we now have an inferior set of actors

Dork voices don't translate well. in English a dork always seems to remain a dork and just trying harder.. in Japanese there is a real set change in the way they talk. They sound more badass, they sound more into it.. Something English just doesn/t seem to get right

But yep.. maybe next time we can prod Sega till they do things right and give us the option

[Orphen]

I don't think you'll be much pleased with the voice acting in PSU, aside from of course the shop owners, they're well-dubbed, maybe because their mouths never move.
As for Storyline, within the first 5 minutes of starting the offline mode I realized: Wow, Ethan is both loud and obnoxious, and abysmally voice-acted. He talks with a shut mouth, gets hit by a car and cries like a pansy, with his mouth closed, and....then I went online.

[Mikari]

Hey if he cries that's fine by me.. At least English voice actors cry where as Japanese ones just wail like banshees.. which in the end just make syou laugh rather than care.

[Faulkie]

Vectors voice wasn't THAT bad.

You must be joking. I tried counting the times I died inside... but I lost count.

[Orphen]

Hey if he cries that's fine by me.. At least English voice actors cry where as Japanese ones just wail like banshees.. which in the end just make syou laugh rather than care.

Trust me...once you hear/see it, you'll be singing a different song. ._.;

[pink]

Ethan's whining is exceptionally annoying yes... cause he does such... a lot. I don't care about lip syncing really as I tend to pay more attention to what's being said. Either way... Ethan's voice is subtable for his "dorky" personality in PSU I find.