Why Nintendo Games Rarely Have Voice Acting - A Look at Nintendo's Complicated History
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ก.ค. 2024
- Nintendo's most popular games rarely use voice acting, and I find that incredibly interesting. In this video, I spend 40 minutes rambling about that fact.
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Games featured: (This isn't all of them)
Super Mario Bros
Super Mario Odyssey
Super Mario 64
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Mario Sunshine
The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time
The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask
Hyrule Warriors
Tomb Raider
Uncharted 2
Elden Ring
Metroid Dread
Animal Crossing
Resident Evil
Resident Evil 2
Ape Escape
Fairly Oddparents Breakin Da Rules
Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius
Lego Star Wars
Starfox Adventures
Persona 5
Xenoblade Chronicles
=============================================
00:00 - Intro
04:24 - NES (8 bit Era)
07:30 - Super Nintendo
10:54 - Nintendo 64
17:04 - Gamecube
24:59 - Wii
29:03 - Wii U
30:16 - 3DS
32:13 - Switch
36:28 - Conclusive Thoughts
39:08 - Lore and Story Outro - เกม
CORRECTION:
Kirby and the Forgotten Land does have voice acting at the very end of the game. I implied it doesn't, which is still largely the case since Kirby doesn't speak, and most of the rest of the game is silent or uses text boxes. The couple minutes of voiced dialogue is more of an anomaly.
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I also would like to acknowledge that there are many games which I did not mention. My primary focus was on picking out a few Nintendo produced highlights from each generation and trying to give a broad overview of Nintendo's biggest franchises. I acknowledge that I didn't cover everything, but I did my best to talk about as many as I could. (I probably should have talked about FE a bit more).
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Anyhow, thanks for reading this.
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If you want to support the channel and get your name featured at the end of future videos you can support me on Patreon here: www.patreon.com/ZillennialDissonance
I'm surprised Fire Emblem wasnt discussed in this video. To be fair, it is developed by Intelligent Systems, but Fire Emblem three houses voices every piece of spoken dialouge, which is mindblowing considering how dialouge heavy the game is.
Yeah, I do kind of regret not talking about it much. I just kind of lumped it in with the section where I acknowledge that JRPGs tend to have voice acting. I personally don't play FE, but I still should have spent a bit more time talking about it specifically.
@@ZillennialRosa You also forgot Warioware Gold and Get it Together. Those two games had full voice acting.
@@chiebukachibee-zoraedu only gold had full voice acting
@@duane6386 oh, right. Still impressive, huh?
@@chiebukachibee-zoraedu Maybe because Intelligent Systems unlike Nintendo are wiling to take risks. Wario Ware was also done by Intelligent Systems.
I remember when I played Warioware Gold for the first time, and how surreal it felt to hear actual voices coming out of the characters' mouths. I played a lot of Nintendo games growing up, so hearing Wario make a noise that isn't just "WAHOOO" or "IT'S A ME, WARIO" brought this primal, child-like confusion out of me.
(Also, this is a fantastic video, and I have a very strong feeling this channel won't be staying under the radar anytime soon.)
What about the funny sentences from Wario World like „Have a rotten say“
I completely forgot to mention Warioware Gold, or even Warioland Shake-it, which had anime cutscenes. Wario games are indeed kind of all over the place.
33:05 "Most of BOTW's story...."
I think this is the first, and likely only time I've ever heard BOTW's acronym being voiced. Most people just say the full "Breath of the Wild" name.
It’s not really shorter when said out loud
I was just goofing around. In this same video I called Link 'Skrinkus' and referred to Super Mario 64 as 'Super McDaddy 64'
@@ZillennialRosa Yeah, lol. I'm just commenting on it because it sounds... so weird.
Keep up the good work!
The new Kirby game did actually have voice acting
Granted, it was a single scene with the speaker not even being visible, but it was there
Yup, and it made for an incredibly memorable scene. That was single-handedly the most unsettling and effective use of a voiceover I've ever experienced in a game, and the postgame doubles down on that and then some.
Admittedly I made an assumption based on past Kirbys and what I played from the demo. I added a correction as a pinned comment. For the most part, the game still behaves like previous Kirby and other Nintendo games.
I seriously love Nintendo. And I can’t love something if I don’t understand and acknowledge the flaws. I know Nintendo isn’t the best. It doesn’t always have voice acting. It doesn’t always make the most realistic surroundings and graphics. However, the music, the nostalgia, and the characters themselves are amazing (in my opinion). Yea, they aren’t perfect either, but it still feels like Nintendo. It is authentic and continues to be authentic, no matter how any of the games may sound, look, feel, or function.
Obviously, this is my opinion! I like seeing others’ opinions about it, especially with videos like this! I love the video!
I made this video because I love Nintendo, and I just wanted to poke some light fun at them. They definitely do things I don't like, but they definitely make talking about video games interesting. They truly are unlike their competitors.
Meanwhile there’s fire emblem, where even “generic NPC 3726” has full voice acting
JRPGs are the exception to the Nintendo rule, and FE goes especially hard.
If you want to know why Kid Icarus Uprising had such good voice work, it's because they hired union actors. It's the difference between a Disney cartoon and an anime dub.
Good point. NOA's localization was also just really good all around.
I think another reason why nintendo doesn't add much voice acting is because of the backlash that Super Mario Sunshine received. Many people back then complained that the voice acting was "out of place" for a Mario game. I'm sure they meant that the voices were cheesy and more time was needed for the voice acting to be natural to listen to, but most people took it as a sign that nintendo games just shouldn't have ANY voice acting at all.
i would love a starfox retrospective, i had little experience with stuff like star fox 2 or star fox command, but 64, adventures, and assault were some of my favorite games as a kid, i wish they expanded on assault's story more
I'd love to cover the series. My current priority is a Paper Mario retrospective, but after that's done I'll plan on covering Starfox
I think a character can convey a lot of emotion and character character without dialogue. And I would like Link to be voice acted.
I would like Link to get some lines of voice acting. For the most part he can remain as a silent protagonist. They can still convey a lot of character with just his expressions but I think once in awhile the use of some key choice words would make his character all the more stronger. Wich I know isn't what Nintendo wants. They very much want him to be an avatar for the audience but I think Link's subtle personality is what attracts a lot of us and allows us to feel comfortable "being" this character.
Either that commit to mute Link and let him use sign language to communicate once in a while >.>
I definitely think there's a way to balance both approaches to link.
@@ZillennialRosa I think so too. I love him so much I've spent so much time studying his character animation in botw. He can be quite expressive and his dialogue options when he interacts with some npcs reveals a lot of his personality. I'm particularly fond of his facial expression when he's standing on a bed and jumps and hits his head on the ceiling xD He is just gritting the pain like a champ.
I really liked that they gave him an in game reason for acting so stoic in the game's cutscenes and then as you play as him you get to see his real personality since he's lost his memories thus his reason to uphold his stoic facade.
This reminds me just how freaking happy I was when Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia (pretty much the last triple A 3DS game imo) was fully voiced. I repeat, every character conversation between actual characters is fully voiced in this game (only random villager NPCs are mostly excluded, though some of them are also voiced if they appear in the main storyline and aren't just fluff) and I really hope they will do the same thing for future FE games as well.
I really wish and hope this becomes more normal for not only FE but also other huge franchises of Nintendo in the future. At least for franchises for which it makes sense... I don't mind Mario or Kirby staying silent for example but I 100% agree that Link NEEDS a voice. That is not likely to happen in BOTW2 but we can only hope the next main Link after BOTW2 in 5-10 years will have one...
Zelda will 100% become more voice focused in the future, which honesty still culture shocks me. Mario honestly has no reason not to imo, Xenoblade is another nintendo franchise though that has heavy use of voice acting, if Xenolade can have 30-40 hours worth of voice acting, I can't see why Zelda can't have more voices. But disagree with Link, he should forever stay silent
Full voice acting in 3DS games is pretty crazy, especially for Fire Emblem and Kid Icarus. Full voice acting is expensive, especially for NPC characters, but Nintendo is also the richest company in Japan and could absolutely afford to go the extra mile.
@@skyriotAndKadeGaming Sadly the problem with voice acting, is that without good direction you get bad voice acting. Final Fantasy 10 and Xenoblade 2 are infamous for terrible acting. Even Zelda's acting in Breath of the Wild isn't great, something about her accent sounds off.
i disagree with you on the idea of link needing to speak. just because he doesn't speak, doesn't mean he doesn't have a personality. people are mute, and link being mute is something that's part of his character. he still has his own personality, he makes his own little witty remarks in small text boxes. i like mute link. i wouldn't want him any other way.
I speaking Link isn't something I'm desparately clammoring for. It's something I personally want, but I also won't be upset if they keep things the way they are. I just hope they find a good way of making mute Link feel more natural in BOTW2.
the last voice acting i heard in a nintendo game was that one scary lady in forgotten land
I'm DYING hoping they'd finally let Link speak in botw 2, to show healing from the shackles of expectations. He was pressured as the hero of hyrule since he found a sword in the woods when he was like, a tot. Can you imagine that kinda weight? But after this adventure is over he will be free. Maybe then we'll finally hear him speak to Zelda, like he reportedly does in her journal entries when it's just the two of them.
That feels like the kind of thing that would happen near the end of the game. Link finally speaks because it's the only way he can save the day or something.
Using SiIvaGunner rips as background music is absolute genius, i love that
I have an affinity for mashups (I actually make my own), and some of the best SiIvaGunner rips don't get as many listens as I feel they deserve.
@@ZillennialRosa I relate to that so much tbh. If mashups can be considered a music genre, they're my favorite one.
A moment of silence for our forgotten Pokemon Stadium announcer.
Surprised you completely neglected to mention WarioWare Gold having full voice acting
Yeah, it kinda fell through the cracks. I mostly wanted to cover a few highlights from each generation, largely the most popular games. I was initially shooting for a 20 minute video but it doubled in length as I realized I needed more room. This video probably needed to be an hour long so I could cover more things. I've gotten a few other comments mentioning this game in particular.
Nintendo is a VERY traditionalist company. Whenever they do something, they hardly change it. The reason the Zelda franchise never had a dedicated jump button until BotW (despite the controller having enough buttons) was because of said traditions.
Nintendo was an major innovator back in the day and still does so now to some extent. Maybe it's because back then they were top dog. It's more modern Nintendo that falls back on tried and true formulas. Even the lead developers for Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild had to come out and say they needed to break the mold. They acknowledged the stagnation.
Kirby has voice acting for like 2 minutes
But not from Kirbo
@@ZillennialRosa fair
Pretty nice video man. Really opened my eyes on how complicated the relationship between Nintendo and voice acting. Keep up the good work.
Its important to note for Link that he does has gotten more personality arguably since OoT and speaks in universe through text options and body language we just can't hear what he says. Samus spoke through monologue in the old games and by Fusion spoke to someone in text but it was the gba. You left out the post 2010's Fire Emblem and Xenoblade games which are riddled with Voiced Dialogue. Also forget limited VA in Wario Ware and the exclusive Japanese Voiced dialogue in Famicom Detective Club remakes but still. You also didn't mention the opening cutscene of World of LIght in Smash Ultimate, where Fox, Pit, Marth, and Zelda all spoke.
All good stuff that I appreciate you bringing up. My goal wasn't to go through each example from every generation. I mainly just wanted to get a look at the general trends, and in the process I missed a few things that now seem obvious in hindsight. I could see myself remaking this video one day.
To me, Nintendo likes to keep teams as small as they possibly can and focus on gameplay as much as possible. Look at all the recycled animations throughout the Zelda games. There's nothing wrong with saving money but Nintendo has been the most stubborn company ever when it comes to "getting with the times" in many aspects.
Nintendo developers are geniuses, but Nintendo corporate is so out of touch and they confuse me.
@@ZillennialRosa yes and yes. They hire geniuses but that's why they do. They basically give them tree stumps to work with and force them to make sculptures. I get it, and that's my point.
They feel we hired you to do X so make this work with Y and figure it out. We don't care if difficult, make it work one way or another and make it great. It's a genius way to think about business but it can obviously bite them in the ass as well
They would have had the perfect opportunity to use their current voice actors they use for their characters in the games for the movie, but they don't even want to give them the opportunity to speak in the movie. Instead they just chose a cast that makes no sense. I always also wondered why nintendo never did voice acting fully despite having actors. So it was a good opportunity to brush up on this because I think it's something people overlook but should care about.
Yeah, they pick celebrities because mainstream audiences are more likely to watch movies with people they know and like. Names sell movies to the public.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Conker's Bad Fur Day on the N64, where they managed to voice basically every single NPC and fit it all inside a cartridge.
On the other hand, while I respect your opinion, I'd argue that it's a good thing that Nintendo keeps the silent protagonist tradition alive, especially in our current gaming era where everything is voice acted, sometimes to a point where it's just constant noise. It's especially annoying when a cutscene's pace is tied to the voices' pace, rather than how fast you can read a text box.
I didn't mention Conker's Bad Fur Day because it was developed by Rareware and isn't technically a Nintendo game. I do end the video by saying it doesn't really matter if games have voice acting or not. It personally doesn't make much of a difference to me since I've played lots of Nintendo games, but when it gets added to game series that don't typically have it, I definitely notice. Right now I'm playing through all the Paper Mario games for a retrospective and I think those games work perfectly with just text.
This gave me so much insight to a lesser talked about point of game dev in such a high quality video, Im shocked you havent gotten more attention. I'll def revisit this since this kind of "Nintendo-ism" is what I hope to achieve in some games I'll (fingers crossed) make in the future! Cant wait to see more of you and Cheeto Cat
Best of luck on your future game! And thank you kindly for the compliment.
36:15 ARMS does have its fans. You can’t say “no one” plays it.
True true. I was just giving it a light jab (with an extend-o arm). I just feel like the Nintendo community has largely forgotten about it.
@@ZillennialRosa At least Nintendo themselves haven’t forgotten about it since we had Min Min in Super Smash Bros Ultimate.
@@benmalsky9834 Very true. Arms will live on.
I feel like the excuse of "let the player imagine their voice" that Ohmori gave for pokémon completely falls flat the second they put a character from gen 8 in pokémon masters with full voice acting
The inconsistency is definitely what makes it stand out.
You can’t blame Kirby.
He is only a puff ball
A puff ball that should not be messed with
POYO!!!
14:11 I imagined Mario just generally grunting and screaming at the environment.
*Curses at the ground*
I speed read the text as fast as I can get it to come across the screen and ignore the voiceover in games for the most part anyhow, I don't really care if a game has voicework so long as it has subtitles that can be skipped through.
Gigachad Xenoblade with all the voice-acting
i know this is about voice acting, but the SNES' Mode 7 uses affine functions for a background layer, actual sprites (at least identified internally as such) cannot be rotated or scaled with the native hardware features, if you want that you'd have to make the desired sprite the background, at least if i recall correctly
Mario Rabbids also featured a voiced song during the intro of one of the bosses.
Remind me which boss? I haven't played it in a few years so I can't really remember.
@@ZillennialRosa wherever the opera singer was. World 3 i think?
Great video but I gotta disagree with you a bit here with Zelda... Sometimes less is more with voices. Samus saying her one line was a big deal in the game. Silent protagonists leave a lot of mystery to players to interpret how they feel and Nintendo has gotten very good at portraying their emotions and thoughts without the use of dialogue, facial emotions with Wind Waker being a standout in particular. You're correct about button-mashing through dialogue, but as an avid PC gamer who grew up with Nintendo and currently playing through the Red Dead series with friends on PS3/PS5, I just button mash and skip through long cutscenes as well. To be honest with you, one of my least favorite things about Breath of the Wild was the cringy voice acting from everyone aside from Zelda, the Goron leader (son was cringy) and the Bird guy. (300+ hours in the game and I don't remember his name lol... Ravio maybe?)
I enjoy Nintendo's philosophy of focusing on gameplay aspects when designing a game... A good story should ADD to the gameplay experience, but too many modern companies are focused on the story first, which is why their game suffers, just look at Last of Us 1 and 2, and even Resident Evil 8. Great cinematic experiences but good lord the replay value is in the dumpster because the games are made so linear due to their story... And this is coming from someone that replays Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and OG Warcraft 3 (which had an excellent story and voice acting!) at least twice a year.
TLDR ; Voice acting isn't necessary for games, and I'd rather have it exempt than shoehorned in at the sacrifice for solid gameplay. It's rare that game companies find a balance in the two to where it doesn't feel like "Movie: The Game."
I agree voice acting isn't necessary for every game. My biggest gripe with BOTW was with Link being mute while other characters were fully voiced. Though, I'll admit that even that doesn't bother me too much as someone who's played every Zelda game. The performances were really mixed, and I hope that for the next game they are better. I like Samus's character being silent, since I think it perfectly suits her games, but Link being mute amidst all the voiced conversations still feels weird. I'm not really all too bothered by any of it though, really I just wanted to poke fun at Nintendo and get some attention on this quirk.
Voice acting and good gameplay isn't mutually exclusive...
Kirby and the forgotten land DOES have voice acting, but only near the end of the main story. Though it’s just a pre-recorded message that’s being played while Kirby is in an elevator.
I guess that technically counts lol.
(sigh) Between various Zelda 80s & 90s cartoons and the CD-i Zelda games w/voice acting, Nintendo probably decided to give an in-universe explanation for why Link doesn't talk in BotW. In that case, it wasn't "trauma", but that he didn't want to ruin people's perception of him as the Champion and wielder of the "blade of evil's bane" (Master Sword).
(Me, I just give him Inuyasha's ENG voice (Richard Ian Cox: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ian_Cox); other players likely do a similar thing -- it's that "imagination" bit that Nintendo was going for.)
Another reason Nintendo probably has is to avoid the financial quagmire of royalty payments. When you only have to worry about paying Charles Martinet a few dollars of SAG-mandated money for every game re-release -- versus an entire voice cast, voice acting is the one thing Nintendo really could afford to cut w/o any serious loss in quality.
Good points here. It's just funny seeing as how Nintendo is the richest company in Japan, yet they don't typically add voice acting, and when they do, it's usually not very much.
even though cartages have less space they also are very unpirateable so if you use a cartage they would be safe from any pirates
ARGHHHHH
Few remarks from a technically inclined me:
The switch *does* have a webbrowser, silly, but you can only access it to log.into hotspots and nothing else. Why? Because the Wii U has been exploited to allow it to run homebrew via the browser, and we can't have those dirty peasants touching our pristine console now, can we?
Similarly, the when the Switch Lite came out, it didn't have Bluetooth functionality at all, despite the hardware for it being there inseparably in the SoC.
On an unrelated note, few weeks prior, the Wii Mini, record holder for being Nintendo's longest unhacked console, as with the SD card slot and internet functionality gone, people couldn't find any entry point that would carry over from the Wii, has finally been hacked after more than a decade after release by using an Exploit that was found in the way the Wiimotes connect via Bluetooth.
This video in 1080p 60fps is just shy of 600MB, so it's not nothing, but yeah, 700MB is barely worth mentioning in face of today's phones that come in configurations of up to 1400 times the storage capacity.
Good insight. I will say that this video was 4.57 GB before TH-cam compression, but yeah, the final output is pretty small once the viewer gets to see it. Storage capacity in general across all electronics has gone up so much in such a relatively short amount of time.
@@ZillennialRosa Yeah it is pretty crazy and not really appreciated by the average person, but in the last five years my work storage has increased by more than 10 times, and that's just salvaged stuff other people didn't want. (I also have at least 5TB worth of old laptop HDDs lol)
Also personally I have for now given up trying to warp my head around the black magic that are codecs and am just recording and uploading raw H.245 video footage to TH-cam with the idea being that it if it's gonna be compressed to TH-cam's likes anyway, might as well not suffer from two passes of artifacts. That footage is like 2-4GB a minute at 1080 60.
Though I wish there would be a publically known encoding target which, if followed, TH-cam would just keep as is, so that one could catch critical issues locally already, and it would decrease their load too, but oh well.
Yeah, codecs are weird and complicated. I've worked with various different formats, and trying to find the best codec for 360 video in particular is wild.
@@ZillennialRosa 360 video? As in those panorama things? What's special about them codec-wise?
@@C-F It's basically video for VR. I've worked with that type of video in stereoscopic 3D, which basically requires the file to be 8K at 60 frames a second. It uses its own set of codecs and learning how to edit with it was a pain.
If there's one Nintendo franchise that I think NEEDS to adapt to voice acting, it's Pokémon. A JRPG like that one, that seems to be slowly getting more and more cinematic, kills absolutely all the scenes without any sort of voice acting.
In Sword and Shield especially, the lack of voice acting was a tremendous loss, since they could have used the multitude of English accents the characters have (as a UK based region) for more characterization. It's not that the characters DON'T already have accents, it's that... they're barely noticable in pure TEXT.
And who could forget the concert scene? The singer flaping his mouth while lyrics pan over the bottom of the screen... no musical backing just awkward foot tapping.
Yeah definitely agreed
The anime has voice acting, why can't the games have that too? Since the games were the first iteration
I 100% agree, I do hope scarlet and violet have voice acting to some degree since legends had a little bit of it so who knows?
I think it’s because of the player character. Either we wouldn’t be able to name our character or all the NPCs would have to not mention the main character
There are ways devs have worked around this problem, though. For example, Dragon Quest 8 has the player character's name replaced with a nickname (ie. Guv) or just saying him/his when referring to him.
Yes, it's a little awkward, but it's better for them to say something than nothing at all when moving their lips in a big fancy cutscene.
If there’s one thing being a Fire Emblem Heroes player has done for me, it’s make me crave a Fire Emblem 4 remake with full voice acting.
You didn't discuss Metroid Other M. This was the first time and will be the only time where Samus has a voice acting, even though it was developed by a different company who has no idea about Metroid franchise and Samus. While her voice acting may have been great, the formula for the game unfortunately ended up being broken
they've already experemented in voice acting what do you think super mario sunshine is. a game were they tried to do voice acing and people liked it? (theres a reason why they never made another super mario game with full voice acting no one liked it )
also, star fox retrospective would be sick.
Your comment is noted and I'll plan on making that retrospective sometime this year.
Great video. Im very dyslexic and this has made me mad for years. the gameplay is good, i know the storys are usualy shalow but ther still seems to be a lot of text to skip and feel like im missing outon somthign whitch frustrates me. Its about time they join the rest of the industry and do full voice acting.
Very valid point. Nintendo's lack of accessibility features across many of their games is a very big issue that goes largely unaddressed by the average player.
I personally don't mind when their games don't have much voice acting especially for something more cinematic. It makes the trailers more interesting at least for Zelda where it's not just Link yelling "TAKE THIS!" or "BY THE BLOOD OF MY FATHERS I WILL END YOU" or some other cheesy JRPG/Japanese action game protag will. Mario and Links' voice clips of grunts and yells are powerful enough on their own for me. But, for some games it makes sense to have the voices of other characters for something like FE. Playing Legends Arceus though I was very disappointed by the lack of voice acting. That felt like the kinda game that woulda benefited from it to really make it feel fresh and new. I'm hoping it spawns a sub series with the more experimental Pokémon gameplay and experiments with things like story more. It could use it greatly.
It truly does depend on the game. The Pokemon Company has been known to not go above and beyond with the most recent generations. VA for at least a few cutscenes would likely help players to be immersed.
Remember when Nintendo gave the Mario gang emotion, personality and new dialogue in the GameCube and DS eras? Now they’ve became VERY lazy these days in newer games using the same voice-clips over and over again, specially with Samantha Kelly as Peach unlike Jen Taylor, (They do it to Charles too, but it’s more noticeable with Sam as Peach), why is Nintendo like this now, I don’t know, but I kinda feel bad for the two of them, they can’t record new voice clips or dialogue as much anymore because Nintendo got greedy.
THIS is what Nintendo needs more of, ACTUAL voice-acting like they used to like the GameCube era and Mario Sunshine, they’ve been like this for a while, (Not sure if all this had to do with people disliking them talking in Sunshine), but honestly Nintendo using the same voice clips over and over for the new games is honestly getting super old now, (the older games I can understand but the fact they want to do this still on the newer systems and want to limit the characters to express themselves talking and have personality anymore like they used to is honestly so sad), (same with Rayman ever since the Rabbids and Sonic for the most part), the characters actually talking and having a personality again would make these games a lot better again…
Hope they consider it in the future with the new Mario Movie and Super Nintendo World…
It kinda goes in line with the general homogenization of Nintendo's brand in more recent years. Up until Super Mario Odyssey, Mario wasn't allowed to stray too far from the standard conventions of the series, and this has been especially notable with the Paper Mario series following Sticker Star.
Id like to at least hear the Pokemon themselves have voice acting.
I usually find the typical bit crush synthy cries kinda forgettable.
I understand they have hundreds of Pokemon but they can just split a teeny couple of actors into archetypes.
A tough guy for more scary looking Pokemon.
A girly voice for cute/feminine Pokemon.
Etc. Etc.
They could just rip the clips they use for the Pokemon anime and use them in the games.
Pokemon had limited Voice Acting on the N64 & then Pokemon Channel used anime voice acting on GameCube. Pokepark Games also gave the Pokemon Voices where they say their own name. Pikachu has a tendency to get voiceacting.
kinda surprised you made no mention of Fire Emblem, both Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses (and even Fire Emblem Warriors) have full voice acting for almost every single line of dialogue. I assume it's just because you don't play these games so just didn't think of them?
I didn't mention FE by name, but I did show footage of FE Awakening when I talked about JRPGs in the later section of the video.
@@ZillennialRosa well yes, i did notice that, I just feel like modern FE in general would've been natural to mention in more detail as it is one of the only Nintendo franchises that has grown to consistently have full voice acting in every release (Since Echoes, that is). Besides, Awakening isn't even one of the FE games that IS fully voice acted (outside of its few prerendered cutscenes).
I'm not trying to criticize, to be clear, it just feels like its an obvious choice for a video of this topic.
@@bakubread9308 That's fair. I added a pinned comment which addresses things I missed. I regret not discussing it more than I did.
1:25 I disagree
If you want a video game.. You go to Nintendo
If you want a cinematic experience or a realistic multiplayer shooter, you go to Playstation and Xbox
Fair point. I probably should have worded that differently. Nintendo games get right into gameplay and focus more on mechanics, whereas exclusives on PS5 or XBOX try to be cinematic and cutting edge.
Link 's title is the silent knight
Starfox retrospective, you say?
Interested
Your interest is noted!
You didn’t mention the secret codec calls in Super Smash Brothers Brawl 😢
Yeah, in hindsight that was a missed opportunity since I already talked about the story mode. This was originally supposed to be a short 20 minute video but it doubled in length as I thought of more things to talk about and show as examples.
35:31 They didn’t even put work into the animation quality, why should they bother trying with anything else?
They know people will buy it no matter what.
Can't believe you went through the N64 without talking about Conker's Bad Fur Day
Good video though
Ah yes, not just full voice acting, but cursing a lot. What a gem, i'm glad i own a physical copy.
Conker wasn't made by Nintendo, but instead Rareware, which is why I didn't talk about it. It even got remade for the XBOX, so I don't associate it with Nintendo.
@@ZillennialRosa true, the publisher was Rare, but this is if not the only example that an N64 game could be fully voice acted, that's what I meant
@@JackieJKENVtuber Yeah, that's true. I sort of used Starfox as the main example for full voice acting on the N64, but it would have been nice to show more examples.
Great vid but btw that chart of console sales is way off. Switch is over 100 million units sold not 61
Yeah, I realized that as I was uploading, but my focus was on showing PS2 lifetime sales which are still the same, so I didn't feel it mattered that much.
And then there's Fire Emblem Three houses... owner of all the voice acting. Which I'm still astonished, they really didn't need to go so hard but damn the game is all the better for it.
The most current Nintendo game I'm playing is Legends Arceus and it really is a disservice to the game to not have some voice acting for the dialogue heavy cutscenes. Never have I been so dismissive of dialogue in the game. But if the game doesn't care about adding voice acting for its story then it doesn't give me much reason to care about all the exposition. For the first time I skipped blocks of text in a game. I felt weird since I never do that but honestly I don't regret it the story is merely serviceable at best.
That's a good point. If a game relies solely on text, then the pacing and quality of the story needs to be really good, otherwise it just feels like it gets in the way.
Hye you looking for. House of the dead scarlet dawn well there was a english release at David buster at south caralina or north this the information i have i hope take it well
link can just be mute
Whatever Link decides, I'll be okay with it either way.
I believe one of the smash bros games had snake and his commander talk.
You would be referring to Super Smash Brothers Brawl, the same game as Subspace.
Correct. I wanted to focus more on Subspace since that's supposed to be the main draw. The codecs did go pretty hard and I now regret not mentioning them. They even brought them back in Ultimate.
36:07
>Kirby, nada.
>KatFL: *AND HERE WE ARE!*
Kinda. Kirbo doesn't say much. I should've clarified that in the video.
No WarioWare Gold? That was like the most bizarre choice of putting in voice acting ever
Oh and I guess someone didn’t play Kirby and the Forgotten Land…
I mean, Kirby does have something at the very end, but none of the main characters speak or have fully voiced conversations.
Comment for engagement.
Good video.
Your comment is much appreciated!
I generally don't think of Nintendo exclusives as having good voice acting. I would argue the grunt and/or gibberish stuff is fine or sometimes even great by feeling unique in itself like animal crossing or Splatoon but the full voiced stuff I usually find to be bad. Botw in my opinion is pretty rough in its voice work where it makes me think of the average anime dub. Not bad enough to ruin the game but still something that makes me cringe a lot. Xenoblade 2 wtf. Star fox is bad but at least the funny kind. Fire emblem I see as a mess of va quality, a bit that's great, about half that's bad and the rest is just fine. You can say it's the writing sometimes but I don't think that's an excuse. Sometimes a great book line just doesn't work well when spoken. I think Nintendo has proven they know how to do the mostly text stuff but if they wanna continue adding more voices to their exclusive games they need to get better at doing it. Pokemon I think should add grunts and moans to it's games like Mario has but not fully voiced unless they redo all their old Pokemon sound effects. I think fully voiced would clash against all the gen 1 mons still sounding similar to their Gameboy selves or even some of the new Pokemon sounds I think would likely clash.
It really just depends on the series, and what kind of story Nintendo wants to tell. Most of the acting they have now is pretty rough, but in the games where they try to implement it more, I hope they can improve their quality. I'm interested in seeing if TOTK is an improvement over BOTW.
The player-insert excuse makes no sense. This excuse is often used for RPGs. These games are based on tabletop role playing games and while you take on the role of the character, the character is never you. It's nicer to say it is some high level design philosophy, but it's just a run of the mill cost cutting measure. Indie games aren't following Nintendo's lead. They just have a lower budget to work with. And similarly Nintendo was the underdog fo a lot of generations and they probably needed to maximize what little profit they could get. They probably don't use voice acting because they're just used to it by this point. And so as long as their games keep selling like hotcakes the bean counters probably will keep encouraging it.
vocal.
Man I’m playing Luigi mansion 3 I’m just trying to relax not read books
23:05 And money
I like some of BOTWs Voiceacting, (some I really find offputting)
But well excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me for not wanting to hear Link say a word.
But what if he's voiced by Idris Elba?
@@ZillennialRosa still no
@@ast8177 Sadly the problem with voice acting, is that without good direction you get bad voice acting. Final Fantasy 10 and Xenoblade 2 are infamous for terrible acting. Even Zelda's acting in Breath of the Wild isn't great, something about her accent sounds off.
Wait did you really say kid icarus is nintendos answer to uncharted
Bro thats even more insane than the people saying splatoon was an answer to call of duty
why did you call breath of the wild bottawa 😭
I have a habit of intentionally mispronouncing the names of games and their characters. I also called Link "Skrinkus"
I likened it to Uncharted but also added that it's also a lot like Starfox and Sin & Punishment and in a fantasy setting. It is like uncharted in that you go around shooting things in third person and have a bunch of story elements along with big set pieces and mystical artifacts.
@@ZillennialRosa Eh i guess but its still a lil bit of a stretch
@@ZillennialRosa Thats amazing
Mama mia
Oki dokie
@@ZillennialRosa Wahoo
Nintendo is a very conservative company, so it’s likely they’ll stick to their guns for a while longer. However I do think they’ll slowly build up to full voice acting. Like, I can’t imagine a Metroid game moving forward without full voice acting.
To voice like 5 minutes of dialogue?
@@Whispernyan yea
@@see.eye.2361 Sadly the problem with voice acting, is that without good direction you get bad voice acting. Final Fantasy 10 and Xenoblade 2 are infamous for terrible acting. Even Zelda's acting in Breath of the Wild isn't great, something about her accent sounds off.
Everybody hates Mario voice
Wahoo
Video Games should be VideoGames not movies (simple)
When Nintendo Sega or any game company does voice acting it's always either -
"Meh"
"The voice acting is so annoying that you may need to the mute audio on the TV" ^(actual quote from IGN)
"Laughable but charming either way"
Or "Pretty good!"
So apparently there's no in between so no voice acting for everybody