Silent Hill Analysis | The 'Weird' Voice Acting of SH1
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ต.ค. 2021
- #silenthill #silenthillanalysis #sh1 #silenthillps1
The story behind Silent Hill's strange voice acting, and why it might be purposeful.
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![Silent Hill Analysis | Developing the Town of Silent Hill [PS1]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4sA8yC8zRUw/mqdefault.jpg)
RE devs: let's make things slower on purpose
SH devs: let's make things weird on purpose
Drakengard devs: hold my beer
I never thought the voice acting was bad, but maybe because I'm not a native english speaker.
I'm a native English speaker and I never thought it was bad, better then Resident Evil lmao
It had its cringy moments like "MmM, RaDiO. WhAt'S gOinG oN wiTh tHaT rAdiO?" Also Dahlia's "It was foretold by *GYROMANCY* " line will be forever iconic for me for some reason.
@@sephiran973 see, I'm okay whenever Dahlia says her lines weird, because she's clearly batshit.🤣🤣 "It was foretold by GYROMANCY" is a line that demands all the ham.
After all these years this is the first time I see someone else pointing out the lynchian nature of the weird pauses between the dialogue lines. Finally.
Wasn't intentional according to Blaustien. Was due to jow the engine worked. And while I can kind of buy that there was an attempt to make it Lynchian... SH2 was filled with some atrocious acting. MARY/MARIA killed it. But everyone else was mediocre to bad.
Thanks for the shout-out! 🖤
I always found the voice acting in SH1 pretty normal, but my natural language is Spanish (although I had spent 18 years before SH was released, watching American and British movies in their original language, with subtitles, and got used to the sound of English).
SH2, on the other hand, has a voice acting that unsettles me. Guy Cihi, especially, won me over with every single line he said.
I always loved Silent Hill 1's voice acting. Everyone sounds like they're in a daze. Perfectly fits the dream like atmosphere.
Rewatching Twin Peaks while playing Silent Hill 1 is quite the experience.
Absolutely!
I disagree that the game sounds like twin peaks. So many people think that Lynch is all strange dialog. But thatxisnt the case. Strange dialog in Lynch films is the exception... not the rule. There is a lot of naturalistic dialog in Twin Peaks that is well acted... and then the strange dialog pops as a result.
Somehow had no idea the guy who voiced Kauffman also voiced frickin' LYNCH! I'm one of the few dozen Kane & Lynch fans on the planet lol. K&L was honestly a horror series in its own right. There aren't many games out there even to this day that were as dark as those two.
I own Koudelka, but I've never played it. Gosh, it looks gorgeous. I'll have to take it for a spin pretty soon! Awesome video. I had no idea Inaba and Guin voiced the two Alchemilla doctors, but going back to it, one of them sure sounds like Dracula, haha.
you’re so lucky to own koudelka! i hope you play it if you enjoy it!
There definitely are some points in Silent Hill 1's voice acting that just feels bad and comes across like a technical limitation, mostly the "line breaks" between what can fit on screen as a subtitle. But there's so much of the dialog that feels great, and I even thought so when I first played the game as a teenager, in particular the conveying of emotion. You can feel Harry really cares, you get much more of a vibe of Cybil's personality from her tone than you do anything she actually says, etc. The character I remember most often singled out as bad was Dahlia, because she was the weirdest, even though we're introduced to her in an FMV where she's physically being weird. It was obvious she was intentionally weird! But gamers just weren't ready for things to be weird on purpose I guess.
How dare you!
Dahlia has the best voice acting in silent hill series.
@@unknownuser494Gyromancy ftw 😎
These videos are like 3 Michelin’s star meals for my soul AJ!!! Please keep them coming! I’m so love with this series, that I hope that it never ends :)
Twin Peaks, Silent Hill, Majora’s Mask
Consuming these three epitomes of surreal modern art with a mindful contiguity seems to create a magical place in one’s heart that eternally seeks for resolve, happiness, and conclusion.
Castlevania SOTN voice acting is fine as it is. I still have Dracula and Richter's dialogues drilled into my head probably until I die
Tribute?! You steal men's souls and make them your slaves!
Perhaps the same could be said of all religions!
9:27 how did I not notice this? Im picturing the voices of lynch and Kaufman in my head now and it’s blatantly obvious yet I’m just now discovering this lol🤦🏿♂️
I wish I had seen this video much sooner. This was one of your best, Muse. Just phenomenal.
Damn, I didnt know he made legendary líne from dracula sotn... And that even its the sale actor from harry masón. Goddamn I miss those years
Love your videos! Thank you so much. I haven't been this interested in any video that's Silent Hill-related since TRSHE.
The voice acting in Silent Hill is an under rated contributing factor to how creepy it is.
Thanks for uploading
I knew it!!! I had this theory since I've watched Lost Highway and Twin Peaks... also I kinda read somewhere these strange twitches and gestures some characters have were unintentional... thanks for this video!!! I also think David Lynch should've been the only director to ever touch the series for any film adaptation... too bad this isn't probably happening at all... thanks again for this video.
Great video!
love your videos!
I always think of the scene at the beginning of Inland Empire where Grace Zabrisky’s character visits Laura Dern’s. The delivery is purposefully stilted and oddly stylized with long pauses between the characters’ lines. Silent Hill 1 dialogue gives me the same feeling
I'll never forget my first experience with substantial voice acting in a home video game. It was RE1 on my brand new PS1. It was maybe the third game I rented and I was dying to play it. The opening cinema scene was awesomely bad and when the characters got into the mansion I was raring to go. But they were...silent. None of them were talking, they were just standing around and occasionally turning towards each other and gesticulating. After a minute it became obvious that there was supposed to be spoken dialogue but I wasn't hearing it. I could hear the sound effects, but no voices at all. It was incredibly odd.
I went back to the store and exchanged copies. Same thing. I was utterly perplexed. Eventually I decided to return my Playstation for a new one and yep, lo and behold, I could hear the voices now. And, as my cousin would point out many years later, "you didn't know how lucky you were when you couldn't".
Always a great presentation and research.
I'm afraid the reasons given for the pauses may not be true - I think each line of dialog is stored in separate files, this is why the actors were asked to leave gaps, so that the lines could be chopped up after. Or each line was being recorded to separate files live, either way the end results are the same. The PlayStation doesn't have enough RAM to hold a long audio file. The laser in the PlayStation then has to move to a different part of the CD between each line, this is why there's pauses (I think you can hear the PlayStation doing this). I discovered this when PlayStation emulators were in their early days, I tried Silent Hill, the lines of dialogue were in the wrong order, sometimes even from the wrong scene. The gaps were too short too, because the emulator was too fast. Team Silent could have made a single audio track per scene but they probably had already made all the animations. Evidence of this is the Silent Hill demo, since there's no voices present. So the audio files for each line had to be placed in accordance to the animations. Voice acting is usually done first in the animation industry though not all the time, and I think the further you go back in time, the more often it was done second in Japan.
Unfortunately my reason isn't artful like the one in this video. On the other hand I might be wrong, also the reason could be a combination of both. It's possible Team Silent saw the technical issues and worked with them, deciding to make the game speech like Twin Peaks. I mean the pauses aren't the only thing that makes the speech odd. Personally I like it and I'm also a Twin Peaks fan, I picked up on Silent Hill sounding a bit like it many years ago.
I would buy the concept that the voice acting was intentionally bad if stuff like SoTN wasn't absolutely AWFUL. He just wasn't a good voice actor.
God I love your videos. They are so well put together and pleasing.
I never thought that voice acting in silent hill one was bad
I like your videos your voice pulls me and sounds like one of those experience story teller.
I LOVE this series! But I have a question: as a fan I think it's obvious (just my thought/assumption) that there was a marked change in the games after 4 and that they became a bit derivative. The assumption in the Team Silent narrative is that this was due to a total shift in the talent working on the game, whereas there had been a continuous lineage in "team silent." Do you think "Team Silent" is a fair heuristic? Despite that the team for SH4 was almost totally different from the one that made SH1, there must have been some institutional norms and creative values that carried through from 1 to 4.
Without spoiling later videos to come... I think there is a change that occurs and a reason the later games feel different, but I do not think it is because there was a 'Team Silent'. Should be one more video before we finally touch on the subject! :D
I really do love the voice actors for sh 1
Some of the Silent Hill voice actors have similar faces to their characters.
Great video!!!!
Keep up the great work muse
Love your channel😎👍
OH MY GOD Inaba voices that doctor. The most amazing voice in the game
I hear arabesque at the beginning! Love that song (or piece, don't crucify me ,classical music ppl)
Anyway I freaking love your videos. Anyone who questions the commonly repeated trivia an does their own deep research is very important in this internet age!!
i like silenthill VA the way it is.. as a person living in asia.. it doesnt bother me a bit
Just like Agent Smith from the matrix. That slow lilting precise speech added to the uncanny valley so much in SH1-3 and a lot of other jhorror games of the era. Its something missing in later installments and just generally. It was purposely done in a way to feel off.
7:19 The House of The Dead voice acting was even worse than the early Resident Evils.
I know they're not related to Silent Hill, but seeing all those clips from early 90s Disney recording sessions gave me a thrill
silent hill 2 was also good
buen video genia
Was Thessaly Lerner doing heroin in the pic...?
It sounds uncomfortable to listen to. Maybe they intended it that way.
I think that Michael Gwin's performance is a bit exaggerated and hammy, with stresses all over the place, but I'm not a native speaker, so maybe I'm wrong.
Also, the 1-second rule before and after every take is pretty much commonplace in dubbing. Usually it's not a problem, so it either was intentional, as you say, or someone made a mess in the editing room.
Would be interesting to have the opinion of a Japanese native speaker on the Japanese dub.
Huh? Voice acting?
What's going on with that voice acting?
People don't actually know what "bad voice acting" is.
Bad voice acting is when some Troy Baker or whatever reads to you a paragraph of text and you remember none of it a second after.
You hear a single voice line in Silent Hill 1 said in the strangest way possible and it is burned into your memory for the rest of your life.
I know this is a ten month old comment, but a strange line reading doesn't equate to good voice acting. If it did, then Resident Evil had stellar voice acting. The reads were unusual, and memorable.
Not to say SH's acting is bad, but I disagree with implying that a strange memorable read always equates to good acting.
@@lindenbree9188 "Good" is a meaningless qualifier. Personally, I don't like good things - I like interesting things. But this is just a matter of taste, really : )
Intentional or unintentional, bad voice acting is bad voice acting. It kills the immersion, leaves a bad taste in the mouth.