Don't Hire Your Family to Voice Over Your Video Game

[Cobra]

Or at least give them some direction or something.... anything.
Damn it, I rather hear the little blips from the old Shining Force games, they had more emotion and feeling...

Say hello to the Jelinek family

[NESman93]

That sounded...well i just cant describe it.



Okay! it sounds like Shit!

[Darth Sidious]

Wow...I've heard some really bad voice acting in my life, but this is way down there among the worst. Seriously, it's even below Shining Force III, and that's pretty sad.
Sure, O3 Entertainment didn't have a high budget, and they're newbies, granted, but seriously...it sounds like all those lines were done in one take, Ed Wood style ("Cut! That was perfect!"). Couldn't they have at least tried to make their family members sound like, you know, they actually knew their characters and what's going on in the game?
And what's with "Nicole" instead of "Nicolai" or "Karen" instead of "Karin"? Was it so hard to stick with the established names?
The writing isn't all that great, either. I mean, early in the game, there already are lines such as "Looks like a scarecrow. Pretty pointless, though, with no crows down there."...seriously. That's not even funny in a so-bad-it's-good way...that's just insanely dumb and pointless. Huge parts of the translation come off as awkward, bordering on nonsensical...oh man. Those voice actors are just the icing on the cake, if you will.

This scene really stands out, too. Just compare it to the great job the voice actors did with their characters in Shadow Hearts: Covenant, and then look at these pathetic immitations of Yuri, Karin and Nicolai...makes it all the more impressive, doesn't it?

But you know what's really sad? We're living in the year 2008. Ever since voice acting became common during the 90s with CD bases consoles, the quality of voice acting has been steadily imoproving, from shlock like "you, the master of unlocking" or "people won't like you, Steve, if you're too sting-ee (-y?)" to high class voice acting in games like Kingdom Hearts I & II or Xenosaga Episode I and III, with professional voice actors who know their characters (such as Crispin Freeman, Yuri Lowenthal, Cam Clarke or even Johnny Yong Bosch) or even respected celebrities such as Christopher Lee doing some brilliant work.  And then this. It's hard to believe that voice work this bad could even receive any stamp of approval from any company...quite a step backwards if you ask me. Even worse than what I've heard in Musashi Samurai Legend a couple of years ago...

[James]

Is that a real game? One released for general purchase?

When I first watched it, I thought it was a home made jobbie but Darth Sidious made me think otherwise.

[Darth Sidious]

@James
Yes, it really is a game, and quite an obscure one, too. It's called "Chaos Wars", and it was originally released in Japan in 2006 by Idea Factory. Typical for Idea Factory, it's a 2D tactical RPG, similar to Disgaea, La Pucelle and so forth (also, the talking character portraits as a means of advancing the story are another similarity with NI games).
Normally, no one would have really put much interest in Chaos Wars with Nippon Ichi's superior competitors, but what makes Chaos Wars unique is the fact that it's a cross-over game, much like in "Namco x Capcom", which means that countless characters from several franchises make an appearance. That would sound like a fanboy's dream come true, but these characters are not exactly well known outside Japan, except for a few games that were, unfortunately, overlooked.
Here's a small overview of the characters that make an appearance:
Shadow Hearts (Aruze)
Growlanser (Atlus/Career Soft)
Gungrave (RED, the team behind Sakura Taisen)
Shinsengumi Gunraw Den (again by RED)
Blazing Souls
Spectral Souls
Spectral Force
Gakuen Toshi Vara Noir
Hametsu no Mars

Apart from Shadow Hearts, Growlanser and maybe Gungrave, none of the other titles are either known in the US or have even been released stateside.

As for the characters that appear, I know only a couple of them, and these include Yuri, Alice, Karin and Nicolai from Shadow Hearts, Melvina (Growlanser: Heritage of War), Monica (Growlanser III: The Dual Darkness) and Zeonsilt (Growlanser VI: Precarious World).

The reason for the low quality of the voice acting is pretty simple: normally, you'd expect experts like Nippon Ichi Software America, Atlus or even Xseed to translate an obscure title such as this one. However, for some reason, newcomer O3 Entertainment picked up the rights for Chaos Wars, and apparently, they didn't have the budget to cast well known American video game voice actors or to even put as much effort into the translation as you'd normally expect any other company to do. On top of that, the game has only been released at gamestop for some reason, making it kinda rare already. Oh well, I'll try to get my hans at this game at some point, at least the gameplay should be rock solid.

[Cobra]

As Darth Sidious stated, this is indeed a commercial release for the PS2.
The saddest thing about that is I have played free ware games with better voice acting than this.

[BadEnoughDude]

This game is also pretty limited and fairly valuable (right now). Sealed copies can go for upwards of $70 on the bay.

[Fuyukaze]

God, I actualy wanted this game when I first saw it.  Those voices, they suck so much!  I'm just not sure I want to spend that much $$ on a game I have to keep on mute.

[Darth Sidious]

@Fuyukaze
Well, there's actually a dual-language option. So, in case you can't enjoy the voice acting even on a so-bad-it's-good level, you can always switch to the Japanese voice acting - which is kinda consistent, seeing as how during battles, voice samples are only in Japanese (looks like O3 went out of budget...).

[Sirgin]

Hahaha. That's just terrible. I'm sure I could do a better Uru AND Karen than those people! Geez, it's like they're actually reading the script for the first time or something.

[Cobra]

I don't know if I would say it "is so-bad-it's-good"
I honestly could not imagine anyone playing it through with the English dubbing.

I bet people are grateful for some of that "awful" '90s dubbing now

[DuncanR2N]

Why is this game so expense?  It only came out two months ago in the states.  Geez, I paid $40 new.  Was it that limited of a release?

[hXd]

I like how there's a man named Nicole in this game.