"Hey, look! We're ALL from North America!"
 

Most games nowadays have voice acting. That's nothing new. But what's really getting on my nerves is not the shitty VA, though shitty VA should be forbidden by law. What's annoying me is the fact that every game (almost) have voice acting performed by americans.
I can't understand why it's so hard to get a couple of brits, some scots or whatever along. Just look at how brilliant Dragon Quest 8 sounded.

Anyways, what's the best voice acting in a game you've ever encountered? Why did you like the acting so much? Come on people, share!

Best voice acting in a game I have come across is Koudelka on the PlayStation, but that probably says much about the games I have actually played. There isn't an awful lot of voice acting in this game, but enough (during the cinematic sequences) to span the game across 4 CD's. I guess it seems realistic enough although what they did talk about was a bit of a turn off for me.

Other voice acting I've come across (all PS2)? I think Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts is decent, Onimusha: Warlords is detached, Suikoden is incredibly detached, especially as there is usually no background music, so also devoid of atmosphere, Soul Calibur II is the cheese, and some PS2 Megaman game (X7?) was laughable. Safe to say I am inexperienced in this field.

I'm experiencing some sort of deja vu with this thread.

Anything from the brilliant minds from LucasArts has the best voice acting, in my opinion. They know exactly which people to pick, and they all know how to act.

For consoles, I really haven't played many with voice acting, but for the ones I have played, I'm going to Tales of Symphonia. I know some people may stone me for choosing that, but I found nothing wrong with their voice acting in regards to delivery, etc. Great stuff.

http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/ge...udio-ever.html

You mean that deja vu?

Anyway, to stay on topic: Star Fox 64 had some of the best English voice acting I have ever heard. I liked the voices back when it was first released and I still do. The voices really fit with the characters and the actors knew how to adapt their voice to certain situations (if your teammates were under pressure and you wouldn't save them, they would totally stress out). I can't remember disliking a single voice, either (Slippy was alright).

SF64 is proof that you can have a game with nothing but good English voices.

Naw, that was for worst voice acting. I'm sure there were some threads for faves, but I can't remember how far back they were.

I liked the Voice Acting for Valkyrie Profile, since each character seemed to be very emotional, considering the doom and gloom nature of the game. Valkyrie was dead serious, while Lezard was just plain psychotic.

Best acting is easily Fahrenheit. They paid attention to details and nothing sounded stupid or out of place.
Another game that constantly has good VA is the GTA games. Rockstar are one of those developers that really puts time and money on VA and it shows.

Easily the best voice acting in a video game i've ever seen...... well heard.... was Starcraft. It never sounded forced, or retarded or anything like that.

If you're looking for console games, i havn't really played all that many console games with voice acting. At the moment it'd tied between Final Fantasy X and Baten Kaitos. Both have they're annoyances for me, and both have they're ups for me.

The Thief games had some wonderful voice acting for the most part. A few bad ones here and there, but mostly dead-on acting and great voices. Which is all the more surprising because half the of VAs (or more) are people from the game's production team who got drafted to do the voice acting as well. Garrett's VA (Stephen Russel) is the only one I can think of who was an outside talent hired on.

The Kingdom Hearts games tend to have really good voice acting, though I guess that's to be expected since so many of the characters are voiced by Disney's stable of professional VAs. The non-Disney characters tend to be really good too, though. Haley Joel Osment's done a fantastic job voice-acting Sora, and most of the other main characters like Riku and Kairi were all spot-on and well acted. I can only remember a few of the bit characters having godawful voices ("Y'know? Y'know? Y'know?" *stabs*) And who decided it was a good idea for KH2 Aerith to sound like she's on valium?

I sort of remember Koudelka having good voice acting, but I can't remember it well enough to tell. I've been playing Disgaea recently though, and that has a lot of well-done voices for the main characteres. The only thing that really drives me crazy is the random battle cries for the generic units like fighters and thieves ("WHO DA MAN?!! SHAZAM!!" *gouges ears*). Oh, and when Flonne screams "LORD, GIVE ME STRENGTH!" while casting Power of Love. But I don't use her, so it's not an issue.

As for why most of the voices are NA actors... Presumably because the voice acting is recorded in North America, so they use a North American talent pool unless there's a really, really specific voice they need, or they feel like going out of their way to make the voice acting something special. (Which seems to be what's necessary to have a British-sounding voice done by an ACTUAL BRITISH PERSON.)

This shits me almost as much as the way Games will throw in some kind of American component because if they don't all sales gone. TOCA Touring Cars is the real villian here. Despite being an officially licenced European Touring car game, they throw an American into the story mode. ARGH!

I recall Halo having Australian and British accents. Fable sounded great with Pommy accents too.

I really liked the voice acting in Metal Gear Solid. That said the plot and events in 2 and 3 was too ridiculous to allow the actors to use their full talent. The Twin Snakes is probably the best in the series because MGS1 was the most plausible game and they reworked the dialgue, removing the corn for the Gamecube remake. That said, they striped away all the accents...

Half Life 2, bar GMan had great acting, Alyx feels like a real companion throughout.

You've got to be kidding. Play some real games or leave immediatly. Both these titles were shocking.

I liked the voice acting in Tales of Symphonia a lot. It was a huge improvement over the disaster that was Tales of Eternia(Destiny 2 US). I think my favorite voice in the game was Kratos, who was done by Cam Clark. People still hated on the voices in this game just because they weren't left in Japanese. Fools! All of them! ;_;

I think there should always be an option for the original language and captions that correlate to the original language along with the dub and dub captions. From what I hear, Japanese Donald and Goofy are fucking hilarious in Kingdom Hearts.

I'd definitely go with any LucasArts adventure game with my favorite of course being The Curse of Monkey Island. Dominic Armato as Guybrush Threepwood is pure love.

I think Phantom Brave, Disgaea and La Pucelle in particular need a mention. Yeah, of course they're all Nippon Ichi titles, but the voices were extremely fitting. The only problems I had was with Disgaea, ad Laharl's laugh. And Flonne's love preaching. But Phantom Brave was very fitting. All of the voices sounded like they were perfectly in place with the style of characters.

And of course, God of War and the Metal Gear Solid series.

That's because the European territories are third tier to the American and Japanese markets, while the Australian market is virtually nonexistant.

Best voice acting I've heard? Let's see there's Metal Gear Solid, Soul Reaver, Splinter Cell, Chornicles of Riddick, Knights of the Old Repbulic, Jade Empire, Indigo Prophecy, God of War, GTAIII, GTA: VC, Prince of Persia Sands of Time, and Psychonauts.

I really don't give a shit if the voice actors are American or otherwise. There are too many games out there with really, really bad acting that I would take anyone of any nationality just as long as they're good!

Let's not forget Crazi Taxi!

"Hey hey hey, are you ready to make some CRAAZY money?"

"Woah! Take me to the church!"
"YEAH! Party Time!"

I mean hey if we're calling Kratos from ToS as a well acted character then surely B.D. Joe can be listed too!

Seconding Crazy Taxi. Actually, most of Sega's arcade games in general. Sure there's not much, but goofy lines like "WELCOME TO THE FANTASY ZONE" in Space Harrier are made of some kind of ETERNAL LEGEND.

Also while the game itself was pretty hopeless, I found The Getaway's voice acting to be extremely well done. They really put a lot of effort into it, and unlike say, GTA SA, didn't just go totally overboard with swearing for some weak shock value or whatever. It's basically what kept my attention to keep on playing, I guess. And I don't have much of an attention sp-

Hard to just choose one.
The Lucasarts adventure games have wonderful voice acting.
The Discworld games were also great (<3 Eric Idle).
GTA games is another good example.

Dragon Quest VIII (which I'm playing through right now) is really good as well. I was kinda scared going into this one, since the last console RPG I played through (with voice-acting) was FFX. But DQ is a lot better thankfully.

Um, yeah that's why i picked Starcraft as my first choice.

For a Japanese-developed game, I thought Digital Devil Saga had some competent VO work. It wasn't LucasArts by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't half as cheesy as some games.

The best I've ever heard, though, was the Legacy of Kain series. From the quality of writing (i.e. they actually use big words and don't assume an audience of 10-year-olds) to the effort and enthusiasm put into the characters, it felt more believable than any other console adventure/RPG/anything game in my collection. I'd say only LucasArts can give it a run for its money, and even then I think LoK outshines LA in some areas.

Hence all the Eternal Darkness mentions. Same creators, Celtic.

Well, I actually thought that the voice acting for Resident Evil 4 was great. A lot of the scenes sounded like they were actually talking to each other...well, most of them anyway. I never got annoyed or anything.

Only the first game. The rest was handled by Crystal Dynamics.