This is amazing.

What’s there to keep secret about games that have been out in Japan for months before they’re released in English?

Well shit; I feel bad for giving the VAs shit now. They were given a shit hand from Nintendo.

I knew localizations were plagued with problems and stupid decisions, but this is beyond anything I had ever imagined. What else, you give your translators only a line so they can’t tell anyone outside the company about it?

What the… This can’t be serious, can it? How the **** do you give zero information on a character to the voice actor/actress playing him/her and expect that they can do a good job. This, if true, is… wow. Just… wow.

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/polls/1060000/1060340_1340583639302_full.jpg

I know many voice actors know very little about the show their on but usually they’re at least giving their name and their general personality, description, etc.

For many long running shows they usually at least the have the director be able to explain the context the character is presented in before they start dubbing. It’s a bizzare practice and I doubt many (if any) other studios do it and for good reason.

Maybe things changed recently for other games or just this particular one. I recall the screw up a bit back when Danganronpa was finally released. A VA for DR2 spoke about it being released tomorrow and his role, and that role was only in DR2, which effectively announced that DR2 was also coming out before the first game was released.

This is something I’m wondering about too – how many developers do this sort of thing, if it’s only with story-driven games, etc.

This isn’t about the auditions. It’s the actual recording.

Anyone that did such a thing would be in legal trouble and completely ruined in the industry anyway. It’s not a realistic threat and certainly isn’t worth doing something that destroys any chance of a competent performance like removing any semblance of context.

It seems NOA doesn’t think the Actor part of Voice Actors matters.

Perfect excuse to post this… https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZISypgA9M

Obligatory why even have dubs comment

upvote virginity taken

I’ve seen more reasonable policy decisions from Konami the morning after the weekly company coke party.

No wonder the voice actors either sound bored as fuck or over the top retarded.

Fucking Genius Nintendo Treehouse.

Nintendo seal of QUALITY

THESE SURE ARE SOME TASTY LOOKING HAMBURGERS

Don’t care, still buyin’ it. Also, I hope we get more FE reps in the next Smash Bros game.

:^)

I swear to fucking christ I have not heard a single piece of news about this game’s localization that didn’t make me want it less and less.

If this is how NoA handles VA work then I’d hope more nintendo games would go the splatoon, animal crossing, zelda route with weird gibberish languages so they can’t be doing this shit any more.

Nintendo thinks they are still in the 90s where information coming out of Japan was very carefully regulated and exposed only in very brief articles in Nintendo Power and maybe some other video game magazines. They are completely oblivious to the fact that information is instantly known worldwide now thanks to the widespread adoption of the Internet.

Voice actor / game dev here…it’s sadly the smarmy NDA crap that goes on with studios in the states. NDAs are good if used correctly (ie: don’t blurt out to social media what your role is too early)…but the english voice acting ecosystem has sadly become very cliche, secretive and need I say cultish as of late due to some of the more seasoned producers/actors getting very protective over their careers. This is because the number of people auditioning to be voice actors is much higher than ever due to our love for video games and anime. The internet and even some remote VA audition services brought out by the internet has changed the auditioning trails of old…many VAs just need to be decent actors with decent home equipment. This shakes the ground that the actor unions built things on as sadly some producers will opt for cheaper rates/talent now. I agree that some studios underpay their actors but conversely some of the demands/policies of SAG/AFTRA keep new talent out and ask for too much money…creating the need to keep things in-union very secret and yet still ignoring the very purpose of the roles to create a great performance.

Thats not how you spell “needs to”

I’ve listened to just about all of YongYea’s interviews with English-language Metal Gear Solid voice actors. It’s standard practice, even for plots as thick as the ones in the MGS.

Additionally, the lines are often recorded out of sequence. Kris Zimmerman said that the ending plot twist of MGSV was the first line Sutherland recorded. And that goes for just about all games that they voice record, including Western ones (at least traditionally, when they didn’t mo-cap).

Then again, the MGS games are the exception in so many ways. The English dub is easily superior to the Japanese for me. Robin Atkin Downes in MGSV, Josh Keaton in MGS3… the Japanese equivalents lack their finesse, they are just really great performances. For its crappy story, MGSV has one of the best performances all around.

With XSEED and Trails of Cold Steel, they mentioned specifically how the MC’s VA (Sean Chiplock) already researched his role including backstory before starting recording which impressed the VA director. His performance was really good.

I think the big companies tend to do it secretively for all their games.

Will look like I am buying the game used.

They wanted royalties, which was never going to happen. VAs are some of the most respected and well known people in the gaming industry as it is.

As far as “celebrity” status goes among fans, they are, but they’re treated nowhere near as well by the people they work for.

I recall some of their demands were a little much, but as we see here, when you don’t even give voice actors anything to go on because you’re afraid they’ll leak information that is already available anyways, you end up with really shit performances.

Perfect for the;still gona buy fraction.

..

W E ‘ V E
G O T
T R O U B L E ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpSgtoSSIgM

Par for the course.

Ye, this explains so much. Just imagine if the best VA in the world impersonates Sponchbob perfectly, only to figure out after release that he was actually voicing Batman.

Just curious, what would setting up a home studio entail and how much would it cost?

Which is why nobody bought the WiiU.

Clearly children wouldn’t be able to comprehend different cultures.

We’ve got trouble

Could you tell us where would be a good place to start to break into this area ?

Treehouse, next time stick to Mario and Animal Crossing games. Better yet, stick to anything that’s not an RPG or not heavy on story.

The more I hear about this game the more I am certain cancelling my Preorder was the right choice

>[UPDATE]

Rena Strober has responded to our article.

“That’s completely wrong! Of course we’re given character traits and history,” said the voice actress.

While this is certainly different from her original responses, we
have to go by what Rena says, in clarification, as she is the source.

So is she backpedaling now or what?

Damage Control

I got my start by taking voice classes with Bang Zoom Studios and then auditioning like crazy on Voices.com; it’s a bit of a paywall and you are auditioning with a crap ton of other people per role. I’m a programmer by trade and I was never in drama class or acting prior..so if you hear people say you “must have been school drama”..it’s a lie, it helps of course but anyone with practice can learn to act. Granted I was in chorus in high school (14+ years ago) but again, in the end if you put the work in it and better yourself in the craft, you’ll get some work. Oddly, though it was anime that got me into wanting to be a VA, I have yet to do anime. It doesn’t pay as much and sadly still seems to still be very region/union locked (I’m on Long Island, not in CA or TX)…so I’m content with the dubbing, video games, telephone prompts and other work I’ve done. In short, it’s something you should like to do as a job and you’ll have to work it like a job i you want any momentum. I’ve lost a little bit of momentum due to not auditioning in the past couple of months due to my development work, but if you start getting jobs…keep going.

It seems the voice actor is contradicting her previous statements completely. Claims they had directives like character traits and history.

I suspect they weren’t as ok with her statement as she thought they were

now she has backpedaled which tells me they weren’t as okay with this as she thought they’d be

“Say this, or you’ll never work in voice acting again.”
Whether it be by law or back-room clique blackballing, I can see that happening.
However, I have no evidence of this claim.

Most likely.

I do admit, there’s a slight chance it was hyperbole taken out of context.
“We are told very little” can mean anything from less than normal (“Here’s a full bio” vs. “Here’s a partial bio”), to how we understand it (bubkis).

To me it does feel like Capcom’s SV5 comments. I can’t put my finger on why, but it just screams damage control.

NoA being shit goes back further, though then we just thought it was their subcontractors.

She clarified further in that exchange that what she said in her interview was referring to the audition. Seems it was misinterpreted.

Either that or she’s panicking about violating the NDA or whatever.

Well it looks like..

“You’ve gaht trubbule”

It sounds like she was talking about the casting being blind, which makes a lot of sense to not reveal information about what game is being worked on so early on in the development process, rather than the actual dubbing process being blind. That’s how casting works for other secretive projects like movies.

My favorite fan dub or re-dub is this one, by the same guy who did the “How to be an online voice actor” video I linked in another comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh2u8gXX24U&ab_channel=soulbrothanumbuh3

…which would make sense if it was for something that hadn’t already been out for months and wasn’t already well known. It’s not like Nintendo went for an international simultaneous release and was dubbing in english and japanese at the same time. We’re getting the game 8 months later so all the details of what everyone sounds like and what happens in the game can easily be looked up online.

https://twitter.com/RenaStrober/status/700034363052797952

Unfortunately can’t watch the video interview at the moment, but I wonder if she sounded sarcastic when giving the specific answers she’s referring to?

Localization companies still want to keep their announced games under wraps until the official announcement. Casting calls involve a lot of people so if you tell the 50 people that are auditioning exactly what role they’re playing, it’s bound to leak easily. And then you get news articles saying “Nintendo is localizing so-and-so” 6 months before it’s announced.

I’m not saying that it should be a surprise that the game is being localized, but companies try to avoid leaking information.

“the wrong people”

What is that supposed to mean?

Literally standard practice in the industry.

For a ‘niche’ website, you don’t seem to understand how these things work. I was deeply invested in this game, and came across NO spoilers in that entire span of time, purely because of this move.

Yeah, because voice actors always spoil others when they know exactly what they were supposed to voice. Especially when its a game that was out a year before in another region.

See how stupid that is?

People who quote verbatim then report on the information available? I dunno, but that guy is white knighting pretty hard considering that he’s the one doing all the clean up work for her.

As anything that requires the use of actors is a collaborative and dynamic process, withholding information from said actors that is normally essential to said process is a poor practice.

Which is fine in general but in this specific example Fates was getting featured in north american directs for months so the fact that it was being localized was a no brainer so it was silly to keep that pretense going.

And I came across no major spoilers. None. I know nothing about the game’s plot besides having to check whether or not incest was in the game.

“so it’s possible the content is there, just combined into larger files.”
Doesn’t look like it.

“The file size difference of the sound folder isn’t that much.”
US: 759 MB
JPN: 826 MB

“in 2015”

bru

Beats me. The fans it seems going by the context of the tweet. Did she think a public interview like this would just fall under the radar, that nobody would comment on it?

No matter how you slice it she stuck her foot in her mouth. If its exaggeration she made her current employer look bad, if not she’s blatantly lying. If its the truth she knows she said something she shouldn’t have. She’s screwed nine ways to Sunday.

Even assuming the majority of these were MyRoom/Skinship-related….what the hell, NoA?

All said the game still looks interesting. Wish I owned a 3ds.

Are you saying the game being in the hands of players for a year did not cause anything to be spoiled for you (even though thousands of people were actively talking about it), but Nintendo properly informing their English voice actors, that have probably signed non-disclosure agreements, about the characters they’re portraying somehow would have spoiled the game for you? How? Why? What?!

Caught with their pants down by the internet, I think that describes Nintendo perfectly.

Ha! She got into trouble so she had to take her words back. More proof that Nintendo of America is shit.

lol @ “The wrong people.” This site has been reasonable every step of the way but it’s still on the blacklist for wrongthink, I guess.

As a business owner, I’m quick to judge the actions of unions. However unions can be good if they don’t act like a cult/mafia nor mimic ways heinous businesses that created the need for them. The lack of receiving duel audio in many cases is actually from Japanese license holders not understanding the global fandoms and still adhering to very old business practices. Licensing can cost a western studio a crap ton of money (when it shouldn’t) so they will opt to underpay actors if money is tight (giving unions something to be upset about). Studios and license holders still run a business of making money from the litigations on their IP as oppose to the very content generated from their IP. The way to fix much of this is for independent studios to continue to make strides and if possible, be as independent as they can by not giving in to venture capitalists that might fund their games or media, instead make money from the sales and distribution of the content as oppose to copyright/licensing litigations, VCs or just selling out. The internet being global and instant is making much of these middle men become obsolete since distribution and overly protecting content with licensing litigations is easily being called out (rightfully) by the fans (note: in my weird varied professions I’m also a Japanese figure business owner so I see this in that business and not just in voice acting, anime and games)

They removed the video.

Too bad for them the internet never forgets and there are MP4s of it aplenty.

Whoever buys anything from Nintendo anymore should be ashamed of themselves

So, the real story here, at least as far as the “official” story goes, is that Rena Strober is a liar?
Because if that’s what they’re going with, why should we now believe her when she says her previous statement wasn’t true?

Nice. Now we get obvious lies.

It’s amazing how quickly the harassment claims started popping up.

Sounds like she’s covering her ass now after saying the truth previously.

Nintendo sucks at localization? YOU DON’T SAY!

“That’s completely wrong! Of course we’re given character traits and history,”

That only raises further questions.

http://i.imgur.com/qbLaoeH.jpg

The Nintendo Seal of Localization Butchery

They clearly thought Xenoblade X was a game intended for Kids to Adult. Why else remove the boob sliders in a game otherwise filled with skimpy costumes, swear words and some very mature sidequests? I guess they only had the patience to play the first hour and the boob sliders were the only bad thing they managed to see.

A monkey could provide better voice acting than most english JRPGs and anime receive.

Case in point. Kid Icarus Uprising. What the fuck happened here when Uprising’s english cast was fantastic?

While I’m sure it probably wasn’t too true to the source material, they at least never removed shit and the writing/acting was comedy gold.

That’s not how it reads.

“I was hired” implies she has already passed auditions.

“Embrace the difference” she says. Why didn’t Nintendo “embrace” the Japanese audio, so people could have variety? I wonder, was it just too different?

http://webmshare.com/r6Xqn – Here’s the video of the interview that conveniently when private.

MGS’s creator loves American movies, so I imagine he would pick only the best when casting for the dubbing of the game.

Right?

Yeah, NOA has done a great job making me not want to buy their games anymore.

So what you are saying is that producers think voice actors are idiots that need to be coddled from information about their roles because they lack self control on social media? This is the most twisted “safe space” I’ve ever heard of.

Especially when anything close to “harassment” was directed to either NoA or Treehouse. Kinda looks silly to play the victim when you’re not even the person getting all the flack.

Tons of audio files were removed because of the petting being removed. My guess is that many of those audio files are very short clips so they don’t take up much space, but are numerous.

VAs don’t play video games.

Someone’s in trouble.

dat damage control
“Whoops. Accidentally told the truth. Please take it down”

No way in hell I trust what she said in the update, not after pulling the video and contradicting herself.

NoA is EA levels of evil overlord

Probably because NoA treehouse went and cut a ton of shit they didnt accept. They covered up a ton of things, censored things, removed a TON of voice and such (A WHOPPING 65%). Hell, some of the NoA people are actively shitting on gamers. They dont care.

Agreed. Though I will argue that some studios do abuse and underpay actors at times, it’s rarer than SAG wants us to think and should be up to the individual actor to gauge what their time is worth and call out a studio if they slave drive actors. I will agree that services like Fivver for VA is garbage and degrades the service that a great VA can give but the gatekeeping style of the business with agents, overly strict NDAs, and nepotism-driven/ union-restricted audition pools still harks back to the pre-internet age and it’s the right of both the actors and the fans to call out those practices and when those practices hinder the quality of a production.

Nothing wrong with doing it for a paycheck (we all have to pay rent/mortgage) but put some pride and effort into it.

But I don’t know maybe voice actors are really badly payed/overworked.

Her eyes, they’re soulless . . .

Dbz abridged is probably the greatest thing to come from youtube.

Apparently the fan translation leaves something to be desired too, but it’s better than nothing at this point, and having nothing would be better than this localization.

The fan translation is already stated to not be editted but by request they put it out. They don’t fuck with the characters and the only issue becomes grammar. Since its not done by professionals they can get away with mistakes. The fact there is this shit in the localized version is bs.

Felicia’s VA probably thought she was a cleaning robot or something

Can’t wait to see how this gets twisted into an “All Gamers Are Evil Harassers” article.

ADR stands for.. Automatic Dialog Replacement, it’s a long term for dubbing. For example, my last role was an english dub of an Italian film. I had a time to begin my lines that, with help from the voice/line director, matches as close to the feelings and timing as the original. Live action ADR is notoriously tougher to do right since live action lip syncing is impossible with differing languages. Most anime productions, are ADR throughout the production. Anime mouth movement is limited to “flaps” mostly since even the Japanese voice actors will dub over it. In other words, in ADR animation, the scenes are drawn first and then the voice actors voice over that. So when people go “I prefer subs over dubs”…that a bit of a moot point since even the Japanese voice actors are dubbing just the same as the western VAs; actually, they have it harder since they don’t have previously dubbed audio to work off of like we do in the west. They differ in that 1) Voice actors in Japan are basically given that role for a lifetime; rarely will a role get a new voice actor in Japan..if that happens, it’s usually because the previous actor died. 2) The dubbing in Japan is done with more than one actor in the booth more often than in the west so they can work off each other; making up for not having a reference point since they are the first to dub over the anime.

As for prelay, prelay is the opposite of that production flow and done very often in western animation productions and games in both the east and west. A show like Rick & Morty will have a storyboard made up and a fully printed script where the actors first do a table read…meaning they sit at the table and read their lines with the actors, writers, producers there with no recording (except for a “Making Of”clip . The script sometimes gets a bit revised after the table read and then it goes into recording. At this point the animation is usually not anywhere beyond the storyboard phase. The animation team in prelay wait for the voice actors to do their recordings and then animate around that. Not sure what the case was for Fate here but I’d imagine they (after the rather secretive audition practice) got to work off the Japanese audio in a mostly ADR fashion; with games being more invovled since us devs like to have a number of reads (usually 3) to put in the games.

I want to also stress that Rena congratulate Rena on her getting her first Nintendo gig. I honestly haven’t heard the dub as I’m more upset with Nintendo’s choice to heavily censor the game ala 90’s anime levels. If she or any of the actors sounded off, do remember that the voice/line director is the one who approves the takes and directs the actors so any lack of quality doesn’t usually come form the actor but from their director’s inability to get the most out of the actor.

Don’t mind dubs if they also include the original audio track, that way everyone is happy.

Yeah Rockstar and Bioware are good examples of devs at least caring about voice acting.

When I put 90 hours in a game I actually want good VAs.

>Since its not done by professionals they can get away with mistakes.

I mean, I guess, but even free/hobbyist things should have a level of polish, you know?

Not condoning the localized version, I’m just saying that the options right now are something unofficial and rough or something official and a joke.

Would be nice if the fan translation could get a v2.

1/10 it’s the best I can give you

very informative!

Ha, they re-uploaded the interview with her part edited out. Notice the cut at the 1:56 mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei3GUlsQvOM&feature=iv&src_vid=Yyqq9p8G1o0&annotation_id=annotation_606450127&ab_channel=SuperGeekedUp/SuperKnockedUp

Another reason why 95% of other companies, be them Asian or not, don’t want to make games for Nintendo hardware.
Too much BS to deal with, from ALL branches.

Apparently Nintendo doesn’t have very high standards for their employees, I work at my local hospital and if we posted something along those lines we would be at the least written up and possible fired for disrespecting customers. Your professional job follows you even online, for all the talk of education maybe she should start by being consistent and not using abbreviations in her posts.

Well, see, that’s the thing right there, Nintendo only discovered the internet like twelve minutes ago.

Jesus, I feel kimochi warui. This is absolutely atrocious.

I don’t think Rena should worry about her job after all it’s ninty fault & NDA that back fired & ninty short comings.

Everything ninty does is pathetic like censorship. Etc etc,

No problem Yeah, the localization with both Prison School and Fates are examples of what not to do and hark back to the terrible localization I remember when I first became and anime fan in the mid 90’s. We don’t need to regress back to that. It’s nothing on the voice actors as they are directed on what to say for their lines and the lines I heard sounded like they were acted well…..just they don’t reflect the original characters as they were in Japan. Some creative liberties should be there but these examples are just SJW agenda injection or some things I see in this business with writers were they think everything they write is golden when all they need to do is just mimic the path already cleared for them across the pond.

Downloaded for future preservation. Thanks!

No problem ^_^

So how’s the game selling? If its selling well Nintendo won’t care at the end of the day

“You’re not allowed to know the title of the game, you don’t usually
know your character, you don’t know anything about it, because it’s very
secret information,” Strober said.

So that’s why their dubs are so bad. they dont know what is the ‘character’ of their character. that is why they go with their lifeless, monotone voices. lmao.

Readjust your expectations, this site is basically just a direct opposite to the other sites instead of being the solution of a reasonable middle ground. They’re more trying to fight a battle than to actually improve standards

It’s basically just a matter of picking which bias you prefer and tolerating the shortcomings that accompany it

Even the re-uploaded version’s uploader confirmed that its pretty much true not just nintendo, but for all video game companies.

“Pretty much every video game actor I’ve talked to says most companies do the same thing. So I think it’s something the entire industry needs to work on improving. So I definitely hear you and understand your point. The reason I removed that part of the interview is that Rena is my friend. And if there’s a chance it could hurt her future employment with any company, that’s not something I’m okay with. ”

therefore Rena’s backpedaling attempt is a lie to protect her career with Nintendo and the real shit going on behind the scenes with this garbage “localization”.

Same here man, the only real thing that i kinda want and i think everyone else wants, is the honest truth about this whole miss-mash of information, because i don’t know what is truth and what is not anymore.
The only thing that i can say from listening to both the english and japanse voice of Felicia and Effie that deffinitly something went wrong, one way or another and weither or not the information that has been given are fact, i think in that regard we’re justified atleast to know the truth behind some of the decisions that have been made with the english version of the game from a dev or altleast a explanation from nintendo itself.
it won’t change anything about me buying the game because if some of the voices really irritate me i can always listen to the Japanese voices from an outside source.

Don’t get me wrong @disqus_DO1N00Se5v:disqus i like some of the english voice acting deff your singing and general VA lines, regardless what some1 says are really good, its just some of the other VA that has been done in Fates is just really atrocious.

Ps: srry for the somewhat bad written English but incase you have noticed it ain’t my main language so yea..

Hey Kevin. Yep, sadly that is true. I was told by two people in the industry that there are indeed blacklists amongst studios. Granted, breaking an NDA blatantly like giving away the plot of a role your are in is pretty bad. Still…only if it’s original and never been seen before should that hold true…so Japanese-> English translations shouldn’t be in that category as most fans already know what the plot/characters are in the 6month-year that it still oddly takes to come across our shores. I’ve sadly noticed that, in addition to NDAs getting very strict due to studios still not understanding “this whole internet thing”, that even petty, cliche things could hurt a voice actor. I mean, hell, my talking about this like this could kill my own VA career; but again I don’t give a shit because 1) To me that weeds out studios I don’t want to work with if such petty things ruffle their feathers. 2) I am a game developer, programmer & anime business owner first and foremost. That puts the cards more in my hand to eventually be competition to these studios so if they shun me; they are only digging themselves a deeper hole as I could eventually be the one doing these localizations if my own IP kicks off well. 3) I’m not tied to unions and as a business owner, other than for health insurance reasons, I honestly could care less if I was. Sadly, there is nothing you are missing..those petty blacklists exist and I hope that Rena here did not get black listed for stating the very truth about the unneeded secrecy that happens in the audition phases of IP that is already out and known by many by the time it reaches their studio. It’d be different if it was say an IP like mine that isn’t out. VAs should be given at least a little bit more info going in. The number of VAs that actually get into these auditions are very few so there’s no reason not to devluge more of the content to them (with a reasonable NDA) going in. The bad translation of this (and any other) IP is the result of bad decisions by the directors and producers on this side of the ocean; not the voice actors who were simply directed to emote the way they did (or lack there of). Japanese can’t be translated 100% at times to English but my goodness we need not go back to the sad state of anime/game localization from the 80’s & 90’s. I lived that as a fan and as somebody in the business now, it’s our responsibility not to undo the progress that has been made in this field for the fans.

@princetrunks:disqus See, its stuff like this (and everything else that you’ve mentioned throughout the course of this thread) that have made me think on how I’d like to run my own business, one day.

While I do understand the point of what a non-disclosure agreement is supposed to do and WHY it’s there, the fact that such a legal document has so many stringent rules that nowadays you can’t even say anything about any project unless its in a positive light. (Especially in an instance where said project is garbage and almost everyone acknowledges it).

In some cases, there’s still the feeling of this kind of rule being enforced even after everyone involved did their part to participate in it and said movie / TV show had already run its course once it was released.

If I may be honest, the fact that you are so willing and open to call out practices like this is something that I don’t see from other voice actors / actresses.

Granted, you are a game developer as well as a programmer and you own a business of your own to fall back on. It negates any problems that you might have if you were just a VA and nothing else. But still…

I now look at what you’re saying as an example of what NOT to do when it comes to voice actors.

Are there any other scummy tactics in regards to what happens to VAs (whether it’s been done by the companies or other VAs themselves) that we don’t know about?