Characters Ruined by Their Voice-Acting

[Il_Exile_lI]

Mass Effect's Male Shepard. Holy dong, how did they end up picking this guy? FemShep and almost everyone else in ME gives great performance, but the titular male is just terrible.

Unless you chose to name your character "Mass Effect Shepard," you're incorrectly using the word "titular." Titular refers to the thing for which a work is named, not the main character. As in, Angel is the titular character of the show Angel, or Zelda is the titular character of The Legend of Zelda (even though Link is the protagonist).

Anyway, my theory has always been that they went with Mark Meer because they liked his voice, and only realized his actual acting wasn't that great after it was too late to recast.

 

[joshuaayt]

As much as I love Erin Fitzgerald, I can't look past how much I hate her version of Chie.

It's not that she specifically does a terrible job with her- I was just constantly reminded of how much I preferred the original English actor's delivery. I liked the way original Chie sounded like a normal person- she stammered when she was surprised, and didn't shatter any glass when she shouted.

 

[GundamSentinel]

Mass Effect's Male Shepard. Holy dong, how did they end up picking this guy? FemShep and almost everyone else in ME gives great performance, but the titular male is just terrible.

I felt it was the opposite. ME1 had a bit of a stale performance from MaleShep, but in 2 and 3 he knocked it out of the park. But femshep? Never... really... changed. She was thoroughly boring and tedious to listen to in the first game, and kept that up for the whole series. Her attempts at snarky comments or witty replies fall completely flat, and her angry voice sounds like someone who heard about anger in a five-hour conference with guest speakers and a powerpoint presentation, but never experienced the emotion first-hand. It was very jarring.

After playing through all 3 games as male shep when they came out, I went back a year later to replay them as female shep to do all the DLC content I'd missed, and I had to stop playing midway through 2 - just couldn't stand her voice. Tried to pick her up again with 3, and couldn't do it there either. She just did not sound remotely interested in what was going on, let alone leading every living race in a resistance against killer space robots. Even aside from specific lines that MaleShep just excels at (you big... stupid... jellyfish! etc) the "overall" feel of Shepard was just way better with him. And when he was angry, he was angry; or at least mildly heated. Femshep might as well have been voiced by keanu reaves for all the emotion she displays.

I'm with you on that. many people hold up Jennifer Hale as this amazing voice actress that always does a stellar job, but personally I think she almost always sounds the same: zero range and zero emotion.

 

[SmugFrog]

Gordon Freeman in Half-Life 2. Uggggghhhh!

 

[Someone Depressing]

Fuuka also grates on me.

It's not even that her voice actor can't act; she's a very good voice actor, but she was deliberately made robotically-voiced because she's considered rather bland and unappealing, in story. Soejima end up drawing what is best described as a green-haired Shakira with pants.

So they had to balance it somehow. So instead of fixing the bad design, they ended up giving her awful voice acting.

To a lesser degree, Chie in Persona 4.

To a degree worse than Chie and Fuuka combined, Chie's new voice acting in The Golden.

Both the female and male Shephards from Mass Effect have rather grating voices, but most people either like one and hate the other, or love one and despise the other like they just slaughtered their entire family.

Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins, too. It's not that his voice acting is bad, but... sometimes, it goes really, really high. Enough, just enough, for me to completely hate Alistair.

 

[Kitsune Hunter]

Everyone from Dark Cats. Just watch, the Dark Cats anime, go ahead, the film itself is a horrid piece of shit with its godawful and confusing plot, add that with one of the worst english dubs I've ever heard and you are in for a treat. Also to a lesser extent, Yuno's english va from Mirai Nikki. She's not a bad voice actor, she is quite good, but it's just a case of good va, wrong character, she just doesn't suit Yuno at all.

 

[bbchain]

Biggest offender that came to mind was Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. I am so thankful they decided to give the option to cut off voice acting, becase every performance in the game is grating and sounds like the microphone was buried in a sofa. Even with performances that weren't AS bad, the actors took whatever personality was in the dialogue and butchered it.

 

[SmallHatLogan]

Does Christian Bale as Batman count?

I couldn't stand the dude from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Mainly because he sounded like Christian Bale's Batman.

I don't watch DBZ in Japanese, but Goku's Japanese voice is nauseating to listen to.

 

[soren7550]

Can I say most of the English voice cast in Attack on Titan? Pretty much every character makes me want to tear off my ears. That could in part be because some genius voice director decided to tell every actor "Okay, now I want you to pronounce Mikasa's name wrong for no god damn reason, every god damn time."

Annie is about the sole exception. Pitty she rarely gets any lines.

 

[ZedOmega]

Let's be blunt here. As much as I liked the PS2-era Musou games, Ranmaru's English VA in Samurai Warriors was just... I dunno how to describe it. It sounded like Yugi Mutou was going through a very awkward phase.

 

[[Kira Must Die]]

Can I say most of the English voice cast in Attack on Titan? Pretty much every character makes me want to tear off my ears. That could in part be because some genius voice director decided to tell every actor "Okay, now I want you to pronounce Mikasa's name wrong for no god damn reason, every god damn time."

They pronounce it "MEE-kah-sah," right? Because that's what I hear.

I'm pretty sure that's how it's pronounced.

 

[soren7550]

]

Can I say most of the English voice cast in Attack on Titan? Pretty much every character makes me want to tear off my ears. That could in part be because some genius voice director decided to tell every actor "Okay, now I want you to pronounce Mikasa's name wrong for no god damn reason, every god damn time."

They pronounce it "MEE-kah-sah," right? Because that's what I hear.

I'm pretty sure that's how it's pronounced.

No, in the English dub, they all say "Me-kiss-uh".

I have no idea how they came to that.

 

[Cybylt]

As much as I love Erin Fitzgerald, I can't look past how much I hate her version of Chie.

It's not that she specifically does a terrible job with her- I was just constantly reminded of how much I preferred the original English actor's delivery. I liked the way original Chie sounded like a normal person- she stammered when she was surprised, and didn't shatter any glass when she shouted.

Persona is a weird series. It varies from mind glowingly awesome voice acting to outright terrible. The difference can be jarring.

The biggest one for me is Chie from golden. I loved the original voice actress, since she gave the character both maturity and spunk. The new girl was atrocious, however, and completely killed one of my favorite characters, to the point where she ruins any scene she's in. In fact all the voice changes were awful. Normally I don't mind a change in voice actors, and sometimes I rather like them, but this was a serious trade down.

To be fair to Fitzgerald, it was a director that screwed it up in an effort to make the whole thing go faster by telling her to just try to sound like the JP track.

 

[william12123]

I would say most voice acting (dubbed) for japanese products (Anime, Videogames, etc.) is just unbearable to me. The voices are always too high pitched and I find it very distracting. The only anime where the (translated) version was bearable was "space dandy", and it's one of those few that are made with japanese & english in mind.

 

[whycantijustdeletemyaccount]

Geralt from The Witcher series. He's probably the blandest personality in existence with this monotone and emotionless voice. It sounds like they pulled in a random guy off the street to read lines and didn't tell him that he was supposed to be acting.

Also virtually every JRPG character ever. I find it very hard to get into even the most mainstream stuff in that genre with such annoying voice actors.

 

[hermes]

Everyone in Lego: Lord of the Rings... absolutely everyone.

To be fair, this is not the fault of the actors, but the sounds editor of the game just pasted clips of the movies into LEGO characters. The result was awful, not only it clashed constantly with the action of the cutscenes (since they always sound very dramatic, even while the characters were goofing around), but the edition was so lousy that, many times, you could hear sound effects in the background of the action, or the volume would be all wrong (that is right, they used clips from the edited movies, not from the raw performances)

It made it look more like an amateur mod than a true sequel...

 

[thanatos388]

Speaking of anime there is also Steve Blum's Mugen from Samurai Champloo. It's not that it was bad or anything per se, it was just wrong in almost every possible way. He sounds like Spike from Bebop. The animal like nature and rough personality was just tossed out for another "cool" sounding voice from Blum. Just really miscast.

 

[Azriel Nightshade]

90% of DotA 2's cast.