(All sources come from listed games and celebritàs Wikipedia pages, Behind the Voice Actor pages, and imdb pages)

te know, there’s a lot they don’t tell te about voice acting. One of those things is that voice recitazione is tough. Like really tough. Oh sure, a lot of people will tell you, “You don’t even gotta mostra your face. This isn’t real acting.”. Those are the words of a person who has never attempted to read lines naturally on a piece of paper to convey emotions through just dialogue in their life. Also an idiot. But yeah, voice recitazione isn’t easy. Having to strain your voice just to sound different than other roles te performed, and that’s assuming te can even get the job. There’s the thought that your voice isn’t nearly interesting enough to voice a character. Plus the work that comes with it, with the abuse of voice actors and how they aren’t paid for their work, an incident that is as recente as the 2016-2017 video game voice actor strike. Way to go, video games companies. Proving again that te are just a… fucking mistake. But yeah, being a voice actor is not an easy job to get into, so when people are able to make it, it warms the soul. Hell, I’ve been following people as far back as middle school back in their days on Newgrounds, people like Kira Buckland and Joshua Tomar, who both became prominent voice actors and I didn’t even know that these talented people started out voicing awkward flash animations in 2008. It was really cool to see. But the issue is that some people really, really like the same voice actors. Like Funimation, the Anime studio, will just hire the same ten voice actors again and again. And video games aren’t much better. Like Yuri Lowenthal, I Amore ya, but do te really gotta voice every single character in every single game. And I fucking know it’s you. te don’t change your voice very often. And Nolan North, this man with tons of talent and tons of range. And yet, every director ever says they just want the Nathan drake voice again. Like can te be Uncharted!? We’d really Amore it if te did Uncharted! Can we just make our game Uncharted!? Now this is not to insult o mock the work of these voice actors. They get this kind of attention for a reason. They do their jobs and they do them well. And when video games get più and più expensive to make each and every year, risking even slight profit on a mediocre voice actor can really hurt. So best to just stick with the best. But with that comes a loss of the charm of the awkward voice recitazione of days gone by. I remember being so surprised as a kid to see my brother playing on the Playstation 1 back in 2003 and played Spyro and they could talk. Keep in mind, before this, I only had Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, and Crash Bandicoot 1, and Final fantasy VII. So hearing fully voice acted characters at the age of 5 when I was used to no dialogue was pretty neat. But I want something more. I want the absolute most stilted, most awkward, and most charming of the bad dialogue. So that’s what we’re talking about today. To look at the old bad voice recitazione in games, and instead of doing the “Ha ha! Link talks in Wand of Gamelon! It’s so bad, LOL!”, I want to instead focus on the “Hey, that’s pretty bad, but I think there’s some sort of 80s cheesy cartoon charm to it.”. So, going over a lista of some video games with known bad voice acting, we’ll look at the voice acting, the directing, what the actors were doing for this, and what they did later on with this experience. So come and unisciti me on this weird little look into the world of awkward o just bad voice recitazione in video games.

Exhibit A
Resident Evil



Woah now, Nik. What are te doing now? Blowing your load too early, I see? Yes, we’re going to talk about the one that everyone knows. The cornerstone of bad video game voice acting, here for you. A game that, while not the first to have bad voice acting, and probably not even the first to get popular, it was something special. With many quotable lines like Wesker in his disinterest telling Jill not to open the door. Richard recitazione from a giant bite to his chest the same way someone would schiaffo, smack their toe on the wall. And the meme machine himself, Berry fucking Burton, coming in with a bag of quotes. te pick one. Chris’ blood. Jill sandwich. Master of unlocking. All for your cheesy pleasure. And yet, I personally think it adds to the charm. I mean, sure, the RE1 remake is a vast improvement in every way. But is the average RE fan going to remember any of the lines from the Remake over the plethora of bad lines from Berry. And even still, the recitazione is so lame and so amateurish that I think it works well for this game. The game is set in a horror mansion that takes inspiration from some old films. It has a cutscene containing blood and gore, and with tons of cheese all around. And I’ve detto it before, but Resident Evil ain’t exactly known for it’s brilliant dialogue. Even RE4, as amazing as that game is, is so damn corny. I get the feeling that the bad voice recitazione just gives the game this B-Movie feeling to it, and it just adds to the charm in my eyes. Sure, it may not hold up in the gameplay, and I don’t think the voice recitazione ever held up, but I don’t think we’ll ever forget about the misadventures that went down in that mansion. Sadly, due to the times that this game was released, many voice actors never got credited for their roles. Barry burton was voiced by, oddly, Barry Gjede, who had tons of roles in stuff like Soul Edge, Bloody Roar, Transformers, and as recently as NightCry in 2016. Wesker was voiced da Pablo Kuntz. Rebecca was voiced da Lynn Harris, who also did voice roles in Tales of Phantasia, Mega Man, and Shenmue. Maybe we’ll talk about Shenmue. Sadly, we still have no clue who voiced Jill o Richar. Chris was voiced da Scott Mcculloch, who also had voices in House of the Dead and voiced Richter in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Tragically, in 2000, Mcculloch would pass away in a car accident.

Exhibit B
Mega Man 8



I gotta be real with te people, I never played a single one of the Mega Man baseline games. I was always più into the X series and the best one of all, Mega Man Soccer. But that isn’t to say that I am unfamiliar with the impact the series has, the amount of fan outcry the original series has, and the hilarity that has ensued from the ameture job done da the cast team of Mega Man 8. Now with full animated cutscenes, I’m sure that these looked really cool at the time. It was like the best Anime ever. Dragon Ball! It was also the first game in the series to have voice acting. And uh… it shows. Now we got Mega Man who sounds like a little girl, which I get he has the body of a kid, but I mean, he REALLY sounds like a girl. A lot of the other voice actors like Duo o Protoman sound like they are just tired and barely Leggere their lines. Dr. Wily is out here sounding like he just smoked a pack of Marlboro before the shoot. But the real cream of the crop goes to Mr. Light. If te know about bad voice acting, te know about Mr. Light’s voice acting. How he slurs a lot of his words, how he sounds like Elmer Fudd with the pronunciations of his words, how he will make statements that he reads as a question, and how te can actually hear him fumbling with his lines and trying to fix them. Like this is a contender for the worst voice recitazione to me because of how it really feels like a first attempt, Leggere off the script, with someone who has never voice acted before. And yet it is the most memorable Mr. Light for it. Hell, this whole dub makes Mega Man 8, a game that is considered da some fan and critics to be pretty forgettable in the series, to be entertaining and stands out in the series. It kinda has that old Anime dub quality to it. And I was tempted to check out some voice recitazione from anime, but man, we’d be here all day. Just know that the Akira 80s dub is a classic, Angel Cop is made better with the dub, and anyone who hasn’t seen the original Devilman in dub form is doing themselves a disservice. But yeah, it has that kind of charm to it, just in a più condensed pack. If te want a really hard laugh, then give this a try. As for the voice cast, Mega Man was voiced da Ruth Shiraishi, who would voice X in the also poorly voice acted Mega Man X4. basso was voiced da Darryl Stogre, who now dedicates his time to short films. Proto Man was voiced da Matthew Meersbergen, who worked on a few Jackie Chan films, Mr. Nice Guy and Gen-Y Cops (And is fluent in Japanese). Dr. Wily was voiced da Douglas Kendall, known for only this role and that of Grenade Man. And the man of the hour, the voice of Dr. Light, Jack Evans, who also did roles for multiple people in Pepsiman, the best game ever!

Exhibit C
Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon



Aww, fuck, here we go boys. Birthed from the crevice of the Phillip’s CDi and now lives on in infamy, the CDi Zelda games. Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. Now there’s some interesting history to that one that te may have heard before, so I’ll make it brief. Basically, Nintendo had a deal with Sony to make a new disc drive console. However, they decided to go behind their backs and form a deal with Phillips and told them this without warning. Sony would take their business elsewhere and form the Playstation 1, while Nintendo got… Phillips CD-i… ew. Boy, I sure hope someone got fired for that blunder. With it came a Mario game and three Zelda games. But we’re focusing on the two biggest stinkers. With animazione outsourced to a Russian animazione studio and with voice actors they pulled from a local group of voice actors in Boston, the game received actual praise when it came out, calling the gameplay brilliant… okay. As well as the animazione being “breathtaking”... okay. And detto that the voice recitazione was really good… Okay- Needless to say, time caught up with these games and it was brutal. It’s not the worst voice acting. I mean, it’s not good, but te can tell they tried. But goddamn, call this game Indiana, cause this shit is fucking corny. Awkward lines, especially da Link. Weird, weird voices dato to these ugly characters. And your choice of under o over recitazione with each purchase. But it wasn’t all bad. This game is a cornerstone as it was the first game ever to outsource work to other countries since the Berlin bacheca fell. Thats… a thing, I think. But hey, when te think about it, who got the last laugh here? While the voice recitazione is hilarious, that… kinda worked out. te all know the rest here. The CDi Zelda games managed to stay alive thanks to the addition of Youtube Poops, weird edited video that would modifica down these games and make up a combination of bizarre scenarios. Things like The King Buys a Wii, Link Downloads Sony Vegas, o The King Gets Rick Roll’d. Man, they don’t make jokes like that anymore. And these memes are still going strong to this day, with the character Morshu becoming a staple in long lasting memes, proving that the game is an internet powerhouse that will stick around forever. So yeah, we laugh and joke about it, but it’s the fact that we remember it that will keep Zelda CDi here. It will never go away. And it will always be here… Forever… So anyway, Link was voiced da Jeffery Rath. Zelda was voiced da Bonnie Jean Wilbur, who now teaches improv. And the king himself… The King, as well as Ganon, is voiced da Mark Berry. Shame that nothing else came from these people. But to be fair, they did make internet history. Could te truly do più than that?

Exhibit D
Chaos Wars



Hey, look, it’s a game that I was going to review for the PS2 series of games and do in fact have in my collection. I bought it from a mom and pop store and thought, “Oh, is this the game with the really bad voice acting”. And it sure was, but this is one of the rare cases on this list. Resident Evil. Amazing game, it revolutionized the horror genre. Mega Man 8. Could be better, but it’s not the worst game ever. Zelda on CDi. Trash game, but no one actually plays it and the game makes it so bad it’s good. But Chaos Wars? There’s a reason why I never reviewed it. This game was so dull and so boring that I could not force myself to get through the gameplay. But I say this is one of those rare cases where the bad, terrible, hilarious voice recitazione manages to make the game so much più fun thanks to it. So it’s really hard to say much about the voice actors of this game. Other than the fact that the game was released in 2008. Despite that, this game has it all. Slurring, some characters sound drunk, some characters clip the mics, this one character sounds…. Stereotypically homosexual? But it’s so bad and terrible that it actually turns the game around and makes it più hilarious. It’s hard to find what the voice actors did other than this game, pretty much mostrare that this was their first and only experience. But what really comes shocking is that some of the producers did the voices and even some of the voice actors share names. It’s believed that some of the people involved were Friends and family that were hired to do the roles. And sure, the last name Chu is a pretty common last name, so I can give that the benefit of the doubt. But the last name Jelinek? Twice? Five times if te include the special thanks and one spare crew member, all with different first names? That’s a bit tougher to ignore, Chaos Wars. So yeah, Chaos Wars. It’s a dreadfully boring game, but the voice recitazione keeps people going and makes it something enjoyable. So when the bad voice recitazione is your best quality, it makes te appreciate the voice recitazione a hole lot more.

Exhibit 6
Shenmue



Shenmue, one of the biggest games to come out on the Dreamcast for it’s dynamic overworld, it’s abundance of memorable characters, and a story that was planned to expand up to seventeen titles and tell the story of Ryo hoping to find the man who killed his father. It was an ambitious title, but it was not one marked without issues. Aside from the current one being that Shenmue 3 was not a very good game, a hallmark that has always stuck with the games being the laughable voice acting. Now while the director of the game requested that the game be recorded in Japanese, SEGA was having none of it. A mistake that has come up before with the House of the Dead games, and no spoilers, but a mistake we will see happen again later on the list. So, in order to get some voice actors, the casting crew went all over Japan, looking for anyone who could speak English and agreed to do the role. Literally any average joe off the strada, via who could speak a lick of English. As long as te detto te were a voice actor, te got the job. So needless to say, they were not voice actors. And it shows. A lot of stilted dialogue that also has this weird audio to it, like it was recorded in a storage room o something, sometimes in other rooms. Not helped da the fact that the game's script had many issues, but da the time it was noticed, the game had to be ready then and there, so there was no time for rewrites. But, it kinda adds to the charm of this game. And, plus, ya know, the Japanese audio makes it less painful. Apparently it was good, because the voice of Ryo, Corey Marshall, came back to do the voice of Ryo in Shenmue 3, as well as every other version of Ryo, including the Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing version. So hey, it wasn’t all bad. Just pretend the Italian chef never happened.

Exhibit VII
Heavy Rain



The most recente game on this lista and of course it had to be a game da David Cage, my most hated nemesis alongside Toriyama and that guy who made YIIK. How many hate mails do I have to send to your account before te stop appearing in my articles. But I’m here to stay positive, stay clear, and talk about the bad voice recitazione of Heavy Rain. So Heavy Rain is a weird spot with its voice acting. Some people praise it along with the character designs, while other people hate it and can’t stand the game at all. And let me tell you, go back to this game now and you’ll see that the voice recitazione does not hold up at all. But the reason for that is because David Cage is a man who loves American cinema and wants to be just like American cinema, even if that means not using the strengths of his actors or, god forbid, hire western speaking voice actors. The voices always sound stilted, like nobody is trying, and that is probably due to the fact that the voice actors are not English speaking, but actually are French. Pascal Langdale, voice of Ethan, Leon Ockenden, voice of Norman, and Aurelie Bancilhon, voice of Lauren, are all French speaking actors. And not even voice actors, not mainly. They are all real actors for French drama films and shows. And no, just because you're an actor does not mean te make a good voice actor. Like Tom Hanks is loved da all, but his role in The Polar Express was not good. He sounded angry all the time when he should be a loving guy. And it’s not like he can’t do good voice acting. Woody from Toy Story is a great example. Am I saying that these actors don’t have good direction?... yes. Hell, even with actors like Ellen Page and Willen Defoe in Cage’s successivo game, Beyond: Two Souls, they were incredibly stilted due to poor direction. This is a case of having good actors, but having poor execution thanks to direction. But everyone would learn their lessons. Actors would learn never to act in video games again, perhaps. And Cage would hire actual voice actors and would get the voice of Connor in Detroit: Become Human, Bryan Dechart, a nominee for his role, and had the perfect chemistry with Clancy Brown, Mr. Krabs himself. So hey, it wasn’t a complete wasted experience.

Exhibit 8th
Deep Fear



Okay… So we’ve talked about voice recitazione that is so bad that it’s funny, and voice recitazione that tries way too hard and voice recitazione that doesn’t try at all. But there’s bad. Then there’s so bad it’s funny. Then… There’s the offensive kind of bad. Honestly, Deep Fear’s voice recitazione is just kind of just da the libri when it comes to lackluster horror game voice acting. From people who have not voice acted before and are really trying their best. Same fare as it was with the Resident Evil mention, going for that B-movie charm, either on purpose o on accident… But then we get to the character Dubois. Dubois is… how do I put this. Very… flamboyant. He is a French researcher on the ship that looks over things there and just so happens to… um… partake in the homosexual-ness. And the casting was, um… very much aware of this. And… I really am not too sure what to say about this. Like, they give him a high pitched voice, and have him shriek “Oooh”. And te can even hear the man’s accent give out and switch to his più natural Australian accent. Like come on, what is this? Now of course, I do not blame the voice actor, Winston Kirk for this, and I will say that the kind of offensive caricature of Dubois does make Deep Fear, a game that was not even released in America and kind of relegated to the Sega Saturn hellscape, does give this game some attention. And when any publicity is better than no publicity… um… Congrats, Deep Fear?

Exhibit Q
Yakuza



Okay, this one isn’t anything too special, but I had to talk about this one for my own personal reasons. Plus it manages to mostra the più passion and affectionate side of the voice recitazione side when it comes to the più mediocre side of things. So because Yakuza was a big gritty crime drama that needed to make a big splash in the west for SEGA to continue porting them to the west, they decided to blow their budget on an English dub, getting some really big names. The biggest that anyone has seen on this list. And because of that, Yakuza for PS2 sold like shit, and the games would continue to go into localization hell, getting released years after they were released in Giappone before Yakuza 0 came along and saved the franchise from obscurity in the west. te see, the dub had this big cast of actors and celebrities, some of them such as people like John DiMaggio, voice of Bender from Futurama and Jake the Dog voicing Kashiwagi in this game. Michael Rosenbaum, voice of the Flash and Lex Luthor, voices Nishkiyama in this game. Michael Madsen, who is a legit actor who appears in Kill Bill and Reservoir Dogs, voices Shimano. Bill Farmer, the voice of Goofy, voices Date. And Majima? He’s voiced da Mark Hamill. Ya know?! Luke Skywalker!? But hoo boy, does it not come off well. Now Haruka is voiced da Debbi Derryberry, mostly known for her cartoon roles, including Jimmy Neutron. And while she does her best to sound like a child, it really has moments of breaking. The villain, Jingu, is voiced da Robert Atkins Downes, the voice of Travis Touchdown in No più Heroes. But man, he does not sound threatening at all, which… actually makes sense, dato Jingu. But the voice of Yumi, da Eliza Dushku? Oh good lord, she sounds like she’s intoxicated. Which is actually funny, dato that this voice actress also voiced Shaundi in Saints Row 2. Like drug addict and weeded out of her skull Shaundi. It’s good she’s talented at drama acting. And that doesn’t even include the side characters, complete with random pauses, repeating lines at times, giving off impressions that are trying way too hard to sound cool, and a script that is loaded with all sorts of foul mouth language. Like I know that Yakuza has a lot of slurs in it, but man, the English version just makes it sound juvenile. Complete with goofy middle school level swearing and even complete with Kiryu dropping the hard R(etard) at times. Speaking of which, the voice of Kiryu, while not the worst, definitely has its moments of sounding bad. Like when Kiryu is being stoic and cool, it works, but when it comes to the emotional scenes like with a character death, it sounds like the voice actor is…. Um… trying? But this is not from lack of trying. The voice of Kiryu, Darryl Kurylo, detto that he wanted to give it the best that he could, and even he wasn’t sure if he could do a character like Kiryu justice, but damn did he try. Hell, even with all the weird points, like Rosenbaum having Nishiki pause in the middle of dialogue o Madsen having Shimano speak in this overly gruff tone, it clearly works, and the voice actors all had fun with it. I think that the voice of data actually works. Sure, it sounds very cartoon-like, but it does sound like a hard boiled detective in a way, and I find that charming. Michael Madsen actually enjoyed playing a slimmy fuck like Shimano (No surprise if you’ve seen his work in Tarantino films) and would actually be super down with voicing his character again if Yakuza ever got another dub. And Mark Hamill… Let’s be real, he’s the best voice in this game. Sure, he’s just doing the Joker voice, and it is a shame that Mark Hamill doesn’t even remember doing work on this game, but hey, when te voice thousands of characters, it’s bound to happen. Still, he is doing such a fun job with it. And hey, it wasn’t all bad. As Yakuza 7 did bring back the english dub that was più high quality and even brought back Darryl Kurylo to voice Kiryu again. So yeah, the Yakuza 1 English dub. It’s trash and terrible, but it’s got so much charm to it and everyone sounded like they at least had fun and were happy to do it. What più can I say? Even when Yakuza is sucking, it manages to be charming.

So yeah, I think we covered all that I wanted to cover. The good, the bad, the fuckugly, the weird, the offensive, and the charming. Bad voice recitazione has this level of charm to it that I can’t get enough of. Sure, te can say that it’s mediocre, that it brings the game down, that it’s unbelievable, but that’s the charm of it. There’s nothing like it now. When every game is hiring the same voice actors, it really makes te appreciate the awkward, amateur level recitazione chops from these characters. And with that, I want to look at just one più game. And to say that the voice recitazione of the game is bad is kind of not true, but it’s still different than the conventional voice acting, and for good reason

Exhibit Last
Silent Hill



Yes, I know, saying that the voice recitazione of Silent collina is bad is a sin. But hey, I’ve been defending the bad voice recitazione from the beginning, so what’s one more. Now while te could say that Silent collina 1’s attempt at the voice recitazione being done on purpose was debatable, I still get that feeling from it. But Silent collina 2? There’s no grounds for it. It sounds perfectly natural and on purpose. Everyone talks in an awkward tone. Everyone in that game sounds so unsure. Nobody knows what they’re saying, they blurt out stuff out of nowhere like petty insults and just nonsensical slogans out of the blue, and I think that was the point. People are usually unsure when they are in creepy situations, when meeting people they don’t know, especially when te are meeting people with so much personal turmoil and when te yourself have a ton of personal issues. A lot of people speak in an uncertain way when they are diving headfirst into situations they think they got a handle on until it slaps them in the face. And when put under stress and fear, you’re going to say something that makes no sense. You’re going to blurt it out. And with it being a horror game, all set in a world of uncertainty, in a place trying to fuck with you, trying to get into your mind, hearing this kind of dialogue almost feels like something out of Twin Peaks but cranked to like eleven. And yes, the HD port with new voices is insanely inferior. In every way. Fuck the HD port.

I doubt we’re ever going to get dialogue like this again. Hell, it seems that the general consensus is that we prefer not having this kind of dialogue, especially with games becoming più cinematic and più groundbreaking, trying to immerse people rather than to take them out with something that isn’t natural. But hey, I think we can all agree that characters like Berry burton o King Harkinian o Ryo o that one thug with the slurred tone of voice in Yakuza are all going to be remembered way più than Nolan North voicing the same short hair black haired sarcastic twink in Big Movie-Like Triple A game #5636: Complete Edition.