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Best Voice Acting in Games


Cyber Rat
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So, I've been browsing through Youtube and only seem able to find "Worst VA in video games". Google searches didn't yield any good results either, so maybe it would be nice to make a top 50 list of games and put it on either Youtube or the PressXorDie blog?

 

I've missed a good deal of games in the current generation, so I'm gonna need some help. Just suggest games with quality voice work and either link an example or I'll go dig it out myself. Or if you find a suggestion you strongly disagree with, please mention it. I can't really judge languages I don't speak, so please only suggest English dubs, or games in which different languages are spoken. IE, a game with American characters, but set in a Russian environment where Russian is spoken is ok. A fighting game like BlazBlue where you can choose either English or Japanese voices only counts for the English part.

 

Also, a quick note: if a character is supposed to sound like he has the charisma of a moldy lemon, then it's not bad voice acting if he sounds like that. Same goes for intentionally corny voice acting. If it's supposed to be corny and sounds corny, then it's ok.

 

Stuff suggested so far:

Arcanum,

Arkham Asylum,

Assassin's Creed series,

Atelier Rorona,

Bad Company,

Baldur's Gate 2,

Beyond Good and Evil,

Brutal Legend,

Castlevania: LoS,

Company of Heroes,

Darksiders,

Deus Ex 1,

Diablo 2,

Dragon Age: Origins and DA2,

Duke Nukem games,

Enslaved,

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions,

Folklore,

God Hand,

God of War,

Grim Fandango,

GTA games,

Half-Life 2 + episodes,

Halo games,

Halo ODST,

Heavy Rain,

KOTOR 1 and 2,

Left 4 Dead games,

Mass Effect series,

Max Payne games,

MGS,

Monkey Island special edition remakes,

Neverwinter Nights,

Nier (gonna have to think this through though),

Persona 3,

Persona 4,

Planescape: Torment,

Poker Night at the Inventory,

Portal,

Ratchet and Clank series,

Red Dead Redemption,

Silent Hill 2,

Silent Hill 3 (because I remember Heather being voiced properly. I'll have to check the other characters though),

Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions,

Star Fox 64,

Team Fortress 2,

Thief series,

Transformers: War for Cybertron,

Uncharted,

Valkyria Chronicles,

Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines,

Warcraft 3.

 

Series that share the cast count as one entry (like Mass Effect), while series with completely different casts count as separate entries (Left 4 Dead 1 and 2).

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I've heard several PC-RPG players agree that Planescape: Torment has some of the best voice acting they've heard. I can't vouch for that since I haven't played it though.

 

Persona 4 has some good voice acting, I think. I thought the voice acting was good for the Metal Gear Solid series, too, with the strongest being the first.

 

Some people will disagree with you on Mass Effect. Some characters are better than others, but most people seem to have a beef with male Shephard. I just put his impassiveness down to him being a military man, personally.

 

EDIT: Garrett from the Thief series has always been a favourite of mine, but the voice actor lost a bit of his edge in the third game.

Edited by SanaEquiesterer
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I've heard several PC-RPG players agree that Planescape: Torment has some of the best voice acting they've heard. I can't vouch for that since I haven't played it though.

 

Persona 4 has some good voice acting, I think. I thought the voice acting was good for the Metal Gear Solid series, too, with the strongest being the first.

 

Some people will disagree with you on Mass Effect. Some characters are better than others, but most people seem to have a beef with male Shephard. I just put his impassiveness down to him being a military man, personally.

 

EDIT: Garrett from the Thief series has always been a favourite of mine, but the voice actor lost a bit of his edge in the third game.

 

I actually think that 2 had just as good voice acting as the first. I can understand why people think Raiden was too whiny and all that, but the voice fit the character perfectly.

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I actually think that 2 had just as good voice acting as the first. I can understand why people think Raiden was too whiny and all that, but the voice fit the character perfectly.

 

I agree that Raiden's voice fit, and I never found him whiny either, but more events in MGS come to mind as far as voice acting is concerned.

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Nobody's mentioned Uncharted 2 yet?! I thought the voice acting in that was fantastic. Batman: Arkham Asylum had fantastic voice acting too - Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy?! Yes please! I'd mention Darksiders too just because Mark Hamill does a great job in it. I've always liked the voice acting in the MGS series too. Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions on PSP had some great voice acting too. All the voices suited the characters really well.

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Uncharted 2 has the best voice acting of any game ever made. I personally dont think theres anything that comes close.

only in films.

 

I always liked mgs2, ratchet and clank, and kaine and weiss in nier.

i guess id add rdr too.

 

Oh, and also every like brian cox has in the killzone series. Its amazing.

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Heavy Rain.

 

You may not have liked the accents, and sometimes the limited choices in a conversation meant that you'd flip from neutral to hella pissed off in an instant. But the actual delivery of the voice actors was spot on.

 

I thought about it when I was writing my comment but decided to exclude it because the voice acting really wasn't that great. Some of it was but it was vey inconsistent.

 

Jason. JASON! Jason. JASON! Jason. JASON! JASON! Jason.

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Heavy Rain.

 

You may not have liked the accents, and sometimes the limited choices in a conversation meant that you'd flip from neutral to hella pissed off in an instant. But the actual delivery of the voice actors was spot on.

 

I thought about it when I was writing my comment but decided to exclude it because the voice acting really wasn't that great. Some of it was but it was vey inconsistent.

 

Jason. JASON! Jason. JASON! Jason. JASON! JASON! Jason.

 

Granted, but that's an editorial / user decision. The actual delivery of the actual voice actors was (imo) very good. The fact that you can Press X To Jason umpteen billion times is not the VA's fault. If you repeated anything anyone says over and over it starts to sound odd.

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Vice City is probably one of the games that's pulled a lot of good talent and the voice acting shows.

Ray Liota

William Fichtner

Dennis Hopper

Tom Sizemore

Burt Reynolds

Luis Guzman

Danny Trejo

Gary Busey

Lee Majors

Fairuza Balk

Danny Dyer (lol)

Debbie Harry

Philip Michael Thomas (from Miami Vice and he was Lance Vance too)

Just to name a few.

 

RDR wasn't too bad either in terms of performance. Heavy Rain outside of the main cast there were issues. For instance I forget her name the Prostitute from the Audition, she's French and couldn't pull an American accent. But at least it's not terrible like whatever accent Jane Leeves passes for as Mancunian in Frasier or some warped Indian accents in comedy shows.

 

Valkyria Chronicles wasn't too badly done in English to be fair. Persona 4 was good too. Folklore/Folksoul was actually decent.

Atelier Rorona is cutely voiced compared to so many abominations these days.

Castlevania: LoS was quite decent except for Patrick Stewart's narrative as the story progresses since well man that's just laying it thick.

Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions was quite decently voiced to be fair as was Transformers: War for Cybertron but those are for obvious reasons.

Nier was well voiced for what voice acting it had.

Thief was always good and of course Diablo 2 was really well voiced amongst Blizz games.

Uncharted 2 has some good performances.

Maybe it's me but performance-wise AC1 was better than 2 and brohood, gameplay-wise the other way around.

Truth be told, when you look at what sort of story it tells God of War is actually well performed. If you're thinking it's bad you obviously missed a lot of the films till the mid-90s that portrayed Greek Mythology. it's quite fitting in that context.

Ratchet and Clank was good.

 

I'm not a big fan of mass effect's performances, though I did like the voices in BG2, NWN and KOTOR 1 and even 2 (2 had some great performances but the game was meh thanks to the rush).

Planescape:Torment and Arcanum were both pretty good. I like company of heroes.

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Oblivion had hands down the best voice actors in any game. They were so good even Patrick Stewart couldn't compete n was only able to do a few lines before bethseda wrote his character out of the game to avoid his attempts dragging down the rest of the game.

The vocal range was amazing too. The way between conversation options Old_Woman_7c could go from a croaking hag to a high class duchess type voice was frankly amazing. For all Nolan north get's praise he could only do the one voice throughout Uncharted.

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Oblivion had hands down the best voice actors in any game. They were so good even Patrick Stewart couldn't compete n was only able to do a few lines before bethseda wrote his character out of the game to avoid his attempts dragging down the rest of the game.

The vocal range was amazing too. The way between conversation options Old_Woman_7c could go from a croaking hag to a high class duchess type voice was frankly amazing.

 

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