7 PS2 Games With The Most Sound Acting Became Legendary

Something I’ve heard about the early days of English dubbing in video games is that the original Japanese voice director would get the final voice for all the English dubbing. This meant that, if the lines felt wrong to them, they would eliminate them. Obviously, the pace and pronunciation of English and Japanese are completely different, so speaking normal English will always sound strange to someone who only speaks Japanese. This, then, is why so many games of those days have a strange and harsh tone.

I can’t confirm for sure if this is true or not, but it would explain why so many fifth and sixth generation games don’t have very high performance. The PlayStation 2, in particular, thanks to its large rolodex of third-party support, has had its fair share of games and voice acting that sounds like a fourth grader reading aloud in class. As an avid lover of all things true and scary, though, I think these particular games are worth grabbing and highlighting, both as a testament to how far gaming voice acting has come since then, and to have a good laugh.

7

Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color

“I’m the King of Doodles!”

There is a certain phrase I like to use when talking about acting and voice acting called “dull surprise.” First coined by Mystery Science Theater 3000, bleak surprise refers to the tendency of players to react to major plot events and revelations with what can best be described as a harmless stare. You get a lot of this in a voice acting video game too, with Magic Pengel being a strong example. Even if you can’t see the character’s face, you can tell they are emotionless.

Magic Pengel is a creature collection game where you draw your critters and bring them to life to fight each other. It’s really good, although it would be even better if your character’s partner, Zoe, could express more than two emotions, plural: either irrational surprise, or shouting loudly while somehow not really hearing anything.

Zoe is not alone in this; almost every voiced character in the game follows this general direction of acting. The closest emotion any character exhibits is their antagonists, though in their case, they trade off the awkward surprise for generic bad bad smarminess.

6

Sniper 2

“You smell like me.”

Not every game is released with the express purpose of being a world-changing work of art. Some games know what they are, and what budget titles should be released and sold for the same, ten bucks in the bin. In the early 2000s, a Japanese company called D3 Publisher specialized in these types of games, collectively calling themselves the Simple 2000 series. Another entry in the series that stands out above the rest is The Sniper 2, the EU-only sequel to the Japan-only game.

Sniper 2 is sort of an HBO show, following a sniper on the run from a mob, each level bookended by an opening and closing credits sequence. What is lacking is the performance quality of the HBO show; the characters all sound like they’re reading from completely different scripts, making not even a token attempt to match each other’s tones or emotions.

This leads to some unintentionally funny moments where our main character, Henry, is talking to himself about something or other, followed by the comic character Stanley suddenly talking about how much he enjoyed eating the special chicken at his favorite restaurant.

5

The Eternal Ring

“I have to go now.”

Before its release of Demon’s Souls in 2009 and the creation of the Souls-like genre, FroomSoftware had a way of breaking down the games it created. Some were serious, some were silly, some had big budgets, and some… A game more in the latter category, production-wise, was Eternal Ring, which is not related to Elden Ring.

Eternal Ring is a great classic sword and sorcery fantasy RPG, with a great system for creating your own spell rings. However, the game’s voice acting, due to the lack of clear sections, sounds like it was only made by your parents. Every single character, male and female, has a strangely cool tone, like they have absolutely no interest in whatever they’re talking to you about.

Even the non-human characters you meet, like a big talking water dragon, talk like this, like your father telling you a bedtime story. Funny, one of the few exceptions is the grumpy old guy you meet who sounds less like your father, and like a weird uncle.

4

Mega Man X7

“BURN BURN UNTIL THE EARTH!

It might seem strange that such a huge IP like Mega Man would be included in a list like this, but those in the know remember that the first few Mega Man games to have voice acting weren’t great. The Mega Man 8 dub, in particular, has become a meme legend, immortalizing the name “Doctah Wahwee”. Even a few games later, however, during the PS2 era, things still weren’t quite right. Just look at Mega Man X7.

The English dub of Mega Man X7 not only has more ham than the supermarket, but also an amazing contrast of voices and characters. For example, when you think of X’s sword-wielding friend, Zero, you probably think of a youthful, bold voice like Johnny Yong Bosch, right? After all, in this game, he sounds like a tired 50-year-old man.

Maverick’s vocals aren’t the best, but the most famous dub performance of all is that of Flame Hyenard, a Hyena-like Reploid who must be in constant agony of the Sigma Virus. His voice alternates between questioning, faint surprise, and screaming at the top of his lungs so loud and over and over again, that the lines of his voice often play over each other.

3

Michigan: Report from hell

“PAMELAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

Horror is one of the most complex genres to cross-culturally and linguistically, as not all cultures consider the same things to be scary in the same way. This has led to more than a few horror movies and video games having solid English dubs, as the dub actors are unsure of what to do themselves. One of the most infamous cases of this is Resident Evil, but a more prominent example would be Michigan: Report from Hell.

The premise of this game is that you are a cameraman, along with a reporter and technical assistant, investigating a mysterious supernatural event in the city of Chicago (which is not in Michigan). Your character is very quiet, but your tech, Brisco, has a lot to say to both of you, always delivering jokes and innuendos that don’t really match the vibe.

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When your first reporter, Pamela, is killed by a monster, Brisco lets out the saddest, most adorable sob you’ll ever hear, along the lines of the legendary “oh my gooooood” moment from Troll 2. Is it scary? Not at all. Is it funny? Heck yes, of course.

2

RAD: Robot Alchemic Drive

“It’s called Bread and Water Soup!”

English dubs in the PS2 days were not the same as English dubs for anime; that is, a very different level, and when it was bad, it was bad. It makes some kind of twisted sense, that a game like RAD: Robot Alchemic Drive that tries to mimic the idiosyncrasies of an episode anime in this era would show the worst qualities of both resources in its presentation.

RAD styles follow a mecha anime like Mobile Suit Gundam or Neon Genesis Evangelion, and you, a young student or businessman, have been drafted to command the only human robot defender against an alien invasion. There’s a lot of shouting from all the voice actors, a lot of faint surprise in the delivery, and a lot of proper nouns that don’t mean anything.

The highlight of these characters is your character’s friend, Nanao. She’s supposed to be a focused girl working odd jobs after her family is killed in a robot attack, but she almost always seems to have the same soft-spoken tone in her voice, even when her grandmother gets blown up. Also, there are a few moments where she screams when she’s attacked, but her character reads the line “kyaaaah” literally as “keeeeee-yaaaaaaah!”

1

Chaos wars

“Wow! I can’t really move my body!”

Idea Factory is a Japanese game developer and publisher with a reputation as a creator of “kusoge,” or “crap games.” You know, the games are low enough in budget and generally rotating quality to be fun. You can find a lot of lower quality titles in the IF back catalog, but arguably none more so than Chaos Wars. Significantly, this was not entirely IF’s fault.

Chaos Wars is a tactical RPG that was first released in Japan in 2006, then in America in 2008. Notably, the localization process was handled by a company called O~3 Entertainment, whose CEO was Chris Jelinek. Why am I telling you about the local CEO? Because he is also one of the leading voices, and some leading roles he gave to his immediate family. Did I mention that none of them are voice actors?

Chaos Wars’ English dub is of low bending quality, the kind of voice work that blows your mind as soon as you hear it. Literally, the first words out of my mouth when I heard it were, “Oh no.” I sincerely recommend that everyone watch its clips on YouTube, because any description I can give here will not do it any justice. It has to be heard to be believed.

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