November 25th, 2011

Japanese Voices VS English Voices

This is an argument I see often when someone has the tenacity to ask:

“Is this game dubbed? Is there a Japanese voice option? I won’t play it without Japanese voices.”

The usual answer amongst all the trolling and flaming and insults is:

“The English Voices are really good/excellent!”

Great. You’ve been dismissed, and these people don’t seem to understand one fact. So I’m going to break that fact down for them. This is like pie. What these people have basically asked is:

“Is there going to be Apple Pie at the party? I only want to come if there is Apple Pie. Are there other pies at the party and is Apple one of them? I can only eat apple pie.”

What they got in response is:

“THE CHERRY PIE IS GOOD!”

Now get this. I don’t care if that cherry pie is good. That cherry pie could have been made by the top chef from France or something. The thing is, I HATE cherries. Cherry pie makes me throw up, and if I’m forced to eat it I’ll gag it down and try to change the flavor in my mouth ad swear never to come to that party again even if it was a free party. Cherries are a vile fruit to me.
All these people are basically saying is:

“WTF is wrong with you?! We’re in AMERICA, you eat the goddamn cherry pie and LIKE it! HOW DARE YOU ASK FOR APPLE PIE! This cherry pie is great.”

Yeah, you can see what’s going on here. Cherry pie is the only pie at the party and you want apple. Simple as that. Do these people respect that? Of course not. They’ll sit there and bemoan the fact you don’t like this $200 gourmet cherry pie when you’ve already stated you want the apple pie, PERIOD. They’ll call you a weaboo (WTF does that even mean), japanophile, otaku and a few other unpleasantries just for having likes and opinions that differ from theirs. Game companies also miss this fact and think EVERYONE wants cherry pie, when in fact a good majority of us don’t but some of us are willing to put up with the half baked sour as hell cherry pie.

Heck even having no pie at the party is also an option and there are games that are better off just dumping the pie. That way no one is disappointed.

Localization & Translation

2 responses to “Japanese Voices VS English Voices”

  1. The best thing would be to have several flavors to choose from.
    We should be able to choose subtitle(text) language and voice(audio) language and to be able to make any mix between the two.

    • What’s interesting is there are several Western made games that have that very feature. Like Assassin’s Creed. Guild Wars also let’s you pick a few spoken languages and the subtitles.