Chaos

I'm playing LM, and Profesoor E. Gadd is talking in Japanese!! His words are being translated into english on the top of the screen!!

Zodo

eh, who cares
it's not like people actually LISTEN to what he says.
i usually just try and skip past boring cut scenes

Scheherazade

Subtitles are always better than horribly done dubs, and I have yet to see a well done dub

~Scheherazade

Spicollidriver1

I have to admit that i would much rather have subtitles instead of dubs perfect example of this I have the Saturn version of Symphony of the night, and it blows away the american version the cutscenes give you goosebunps.

ScandalUMD

In movies, I'll agree. In cartoons, I see both sides. In video games, I think they should do the cutscenes in English for the US market.

cartman

Can anyone else confirm this? I played it at Wal-Mart, and I could have sworn he was speaking English! (I'm not fluent enough in Japanese yet to have understaood what he was saying, and I wasn't reading the subtitles).

Soybean

He's not speaking Japanese! He's speaking nothing, in fact. It's just gibberish noises, the likes of which you see in Banjo-Kazooie.

bbox

I just played it and I think Soybean is right, its gibberish. PIKA PIKA!

darkside

My wife picked this game up and we ended up playing it for about 4 hours last night. I ended up really enjoying it despite the bad reviews.

I agree that the language doesn't sound like real Japanese. There is not a ton of dialog anyway so it didn't bother me.

travis_bickle

Someone sent us up the bomb.

Scheherazade

I donno, I was awfully relieved when I picked up ICO and it wasn't dubbed. No matter what the media, I'd really rather hear the original inflections instead of some amteuristic voice actor's interpretation of a language he/she probably doesn't even understand to begin with.

~Scheherazade

Chaos

I could have sworn I heard him say "suki suki", oh well, it sounds like Jap. to me.

Aghama

Klonoa 2 has a similar gibberish language that's reminiscent of Japanese.

ScandalUMD

Who is to say what the "original" is when it's produced simultaneously for both markets? In movies, it's pretty clear. In games, it's much less.

Anyway, I suspect the Japanese voice acting isn't any better than the English voice acting in games. It's probably amateurs as well, most of the time. In fact, in games where the American market is larger, they probably spend more on the American voice acting.

And for games that do the cutscenes in-engine, it's even relatively easy to make the characters' lip synching to look right with each of the different language tracks, without compromising the dialog to make it fit.

Outlaw

With a few exceptions like Metal Gear Solid and Monkey Island, I'd agree that in just about every case in games japanese voice acting is light years better than English. For some reason it just seems a lot more convincing most of the time than English, usually these actors have celebrity status in Japan which is comparable to big movie celebrities here. In fact, Japanese voice actors are so famous in japan they have a special name for the profession: Seiyuu. Japanese drama's are different story on the other hand and seem really fake.

The thing that always bothers me is when they try to bring out animated movies like a new Miyazaki film or an anime show, they usually try to get famous english movie celebrities so people will see their names and go watch it. The problem is that they always have voices that sound much older than the character they're trying to portray and come off sounding dumb. Despite all this I actually do watch dubs and there are sure some good English voice actors out there(although few), I was just making a general observation that the market is smaller in the US. Street Fighter wouldn't be as cool if Ryu said "Fireball!" in english everytime he shot a fireball.

Trigger

I agree - well said.

MWoody

He may have. It was probably gibberish in the original Japanese, so they didn't bother to re-dub it, but even nonsensical sounds will carry some intonation and phonetic structure of the original.

In other words, yes, it's probably Japanese. Japanese gibberish.

jingoro

Just like how "pika pika" sounds japanese?

Neil Bruce

I picked up my GC along with all 3 launch games in Japan, and I can assure you the Japanese version has Japanese-language subtitles as well. The gibberish language the characters speak is kind of like those in ICO, but probably with a few japanese-sounding words thrown in.

Mattalos

Seeing as how the languages in ICO aren't real, I don't see why they would have "dubbed" them. Just FYI, the characters aren't speaking Chinese or Japanese ...

V-ism

Not always so, wait until you see Final Fantasy X. Quite often, developers will not bother redoing lip synchs and rather let the voices adjust to the lips, especially with a game with so much dialogue. I worked on the game, and it was terrible in the beginning.


Back to the gibberish, you think Nintendo chose to use gibberish so they can reuse a few gibberish sounds over and over instead of using alot of real voices because they couldn't fit it on those mini-dvds? I'm just joking.