Visit a forum for a newly-released game with no English voice credits and I guarantee you’ll find a topic or two where a bunch of people try to guess who the actors are. If the credits don’t actually say who did that performance, it can be quite difficult to figure it out, depending on how skilled the voice actor is at changing his/her voice and how prolific the actor is in the industry. Sometimes, I really enjoy a particular voice performance and would love to look up more of that voice actor’s work. What possible value is there in noting actors from other versions of the game when you could instead credit the actual voice actor for that version? This is something that really irks me. I really don’t understand why so many translated games neglect to include the English voice cast. From my experience, it does seem like this third case is the most common with Japanese games, just not by much. There are some games which actually do give proper credit to the English voice cast, such as the aforementioned Lightning Returns-all the credited VAs are replaced with their English counterparts. For both these types of games, the developer only credits the voice actors who aren’t even present in that version of the game, a mind-boggling fact that still shocks the hell out of me. Second, there are games such as Drakengard 3 that do have both vocal tracks (in Drakengard 3’s case, the Japanese track is DLC) but only include the Japanese voice cast in the credits. First are the games like Persona 4, games that are entirely in English, yet still don’t bother to credit the English voice actors. One such commonality that constantly confuses me is a simple question: why is the English voice cast so often left out of the credits in these games?įrom what I’ve noticed, there are three potential outcomes for Japanese games translated into English.
As such a big fan, I spend a lot of time with these games and come to understand some of the commonalities they share.
This year alone has brought Lightning Returns and Drakengard 3, two games I enjoyed immensely for their unique worlds and bold experimentation within their respective genres. Many of them feature kooky characters, creative storylines, and clunky yet interesting gameplay mechanics. Japanese games are some of my favorites, time and time again. J6 Comments Lightning Returns is a recent game that credits its English voice cast. Why don't all dubbed Japanese games credit the English voice actors?
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