General Modern Voice Acting in Zelda!

[The Wanderer]

No. No. Absolutely not. Voice acting ruins games for me. Especially when you consider that this is Nintendo. Remember Super Mario Sunshine? This is MARIO, their #1 series. That's the BEST you could hope for if they did voice acting in Zelda. Now do you really want that?

I feel obligated to bring up something here: Super Mario Sunshine's voice actors generally came from nowhere and are used more for grunts and one-word-sentences than full voice acting. The only real exception, ironically, is Jen Taylor, the voice of Princess Peach in that game. Listen to her as Cortana in Halo or Zoey in Left 4 Dead, and you'll notice a distinct difference in effort. Zelda is viewed as a more "serious" franchise than Mario, so if they got well-known, competent voice actors the likes of, say, Hitman: Absolution, Uncharted, or Final Fantasy XIII, it would sound phenomenal. Since they hold Zelda in a more serious light, voice actors would probably sound more realistic and more mature in their representations of Zelda characters. Mario may be Nintendo's flagship franchise, but I also think it's jumping the gun a bit to assume that would house their best voice acting efforts. Mario games barely have any "real" voice acting at all, meaning the standards for voice actors are lower, and they seem to be encouraged to give goofy characters goofy voices. I doubt this would happen to Zelda. If they took it seriously.

There's a lot to say on voice acting in Zelda, but I'll summarize my thoughts on it. Nintendo should do it. There are too many people asking for it for them to simply ignore it and not rub more and more fans the wrong way. I think, however, it should be completely optional, and players should be given the choice to turn it on or off at the very beginning of the game in addition to any time throughout. So if you don't want any voice acting, you can have that choice. If you do want voice acting, it's there. But Nintendo needs to take some action if they want to please the majority.

I also have to question voicing the game in only Japanese. I agree with Cfrock in that it kind of defeats the purpose of voicing the game in general: if everyone who doesn't speak Japanese has to read subtitles anyway to understand what's happening, is there really a point in providing full voice work? Now, I love the Japanese language. It sounds awesome. I even speak some Japanese. But I don't understand the arguments that all voice acting but Japanese is automatically terrible. Ever listened to Japanese talk in real life? It's not quite in line with anime and video game voice work in a very similar fashion to a lot of English voice acting. Therefore, it's not automatically "better" than English voice acting. You just can't hear the flaws because you don't understand their language. It might be a good idea to include Japanese voice acting alongside your native language in a Zelda game, but why only Japanese...? That seems limiting and unnecessary....

 

[DarkestLink]

I don't know why people want to keep Zelda the same old way... It'd be like playing the same game everytime.... I would love some big changes.

We don't. We just want them to improve it rather than change it. When I think of "change", I think of Super Paper Mario. A nice game, but not the game I wanted. That was some random 2D Mario game with "Paper Mario" slapped on it. Fact is, it wasn't a Paper Mario. It wasn't the game series I had come to love and wanted to purchase.

Likewise, I don't want some random unrelated game to be published and have "Zelda" slapped on the title for the sake of profits.