Full voice acting was the worst thing to happen to this franchise

JP performance was amazing and fun fact: it was 90% comprised of nobodies.

Well EXCUSE ME, princess

The non-English voice tracks are all pretty good, maybe try not having a trash VA industry.

The worst thing will be when the movie comes out and Link not only speaks but speaks in Marvel quips like what they did to Mario.

Why? That's better than leaving him as some mute retard.

Its unnecessary

the italian version was pretty good

It needs to be good. BotW Zelda's voice is grating.

Secret stone? Demon King?

Memer epic unironic chungus style - uhhhh yeah, that just happened.

It would have been good if they went lotr route and made it all subtitled hylian

The King, Urbosa, Revali, and Great Deku Tree had good voices.
The rest in BOTW, AoC, and TOTK were bad.

I’ve played this game three times. One in English, one in Japanese and one in French.
For some reason the French version just felt perfect. It fit with the aesthetic so fucking well and I can’t put my finger on why.

No. Hiring liquid dogshit voice actors was the problem.

Should have had all the dialogue be voiced. They only went halfway.

Zelda is literally the only one with a fake British accent. Everyone else just sounds like a normal American.

Dubbed Japanese games don't represent the industry

American made media doesn't have the voice acting problems that dubs do

Zelda in a diaper

The fake language shit only works for non-human characters. In a series like Zelda, where most of the major characters are humans, it would look db as shit

Link not talking has been dumb since OoT. The guy isn't a self insert, he has his own personality and relationships with other characters.

Absolutely nothing about him is up to the player. He has a pre-set backstory, relationships, design, and as of BotW, name.

Him not talking at this point does nothing but hold the cutscenes and other characters back.

Filtered

Link only has a character when he's offscreen. It's a weirdly consistent thing about him.

for me, it's that Nintendo contracted FromSoft to make a Switch 2 launch title, and SOMEHOW didn't think to have them make a ZELDA game.

I think you mean the best.

Imo not all games need voice acting. What does Zelda games benefit from VA instead of expressive murmurs?
I don't think someone like Midna benefits from fully voiced lines. Voice acting also demands characters to be va compatible in design. Would King of the Red Lions work? How about Groose from SS?

Some games benefit from va, but not adventure focused games like Zelda. Should Link speak? Why?

zelda's voice acting sounds like when you're trying to mock some hideous british accent

When even the creator of fucking Dragon Quest says that silent protagonists don't work anymore, or at least take much more effort to pull off now than they did in the past, it's time to admit defeat

It doesn't need full voice acting, but Link does need to stop being silent. Even Nintendo themselves know this, because they made really flimsy excuses for it in both BotW and Echoes of Wisdom. The latter is especially egregious because Link isn't even the protagonist, Zelda already filled the silent protagonist role.

The Mexican version is good. I imagine other languages also managed to make it good too.

It wasn't THE worst thing (that would be the open world meme) but it was pretty bad yes.
God forbid they finally decide to give Link full voice acting.

Why does he "need" to stop being silent? Especially given that there's a 99.99% chance that his voice acting would be cringe garbage?

The Mexican version

youtube.com/watch?v=yNCgpaMlOcs

Midna technically is fully voiced. Her voice actress spoke in English, and they scrambled it up to make her "gibberish".

bad voice work is distracting.
nintendo's protagonists are almost universally mute so even with voice acting, they'll never have spoken dialogue and are better off with only occasional spoken words (like mario) or mumbles (like pikmin or splatoon characters)

Because the in-universe excuses Nintendo pulls out of their asses for it are really lame.

Also, I didn't say he needed to be fully voiced. I said he needed to stop being silent. An unvoiced character and a silent character are two entirely different things.

The writting in Nintendo games across the board has plummeted since the GCN and the voice acting just puts a spot light on it. Give the same VAs to Wind Waker and it would be perfectly fine

Mario is not mute, nor are the Pikmin characters starting with 3 or the Splatoon characters, they have dialogue even if it's not voiced

yes. that's what I said.
mario doesn't need full voice acting. he's fine for small bits and samples.
olimar doesn't need full voice acting. he's fine with mumble dialogue.

I don't think it's a matter of him being silent and not having voice acting, but just fleshing his character more and have it show in the way he interacts with others. Speaking about BotW, in restrospective, I find it really stupid how you only got to know about how Link was through Zelda's diary, where she explains how he is silent and stoic because he believes that a "chosen hero" should behave that way, and how much of a glutton he is and how happy he looked whenever he cooked a good meal. TotK was even worse in that regard, he isn't even allowed to show emotion when he finally reunites with Zelda when they had supposedly been living together for a couple of years already.

The exact same cast was able to do a better job in Age of Calamity because they had a better voice director.

Mario has been fully voiced on many occasions

DEI should give him a big black thug voice actor.

Link: I'm about to bomb this whole motha fucking place.

I wouldn't say that. Is the voice acting atrocious? Yeah, but if it were good, it wouldn't be an issue.
Know what would make the voice acting, bad as it were, completely irrelevant? If the combat, puzzles, and/or storytelling were at all mediocre, rather than the below average they'd been at for nearly 20 years at the time of BotW's release.
Art from advertisity. Nintendo EAD have none because their fanbase and supervisors don't have any standards, and they have no respect for the medium or themselves, so the end result is a mess of mediocrity that can't even get the comparatively little things (voice acting) right.
Thankfully, garbage companies like Nintendo don't have complete control over the craft. Still, I hope they change. Hurts to see anybody suck so bad.

This

The only game that is improved by voice acting is Deus Ex. In every other case it's annoying as fuck

Imagine playing Borderlands 1 without voice acting.

Deus Ex has that early 2000s voice acting that was serviceable at the time, but was laughably dated by the mid 2000s, when video game voice acting improved across the board

Zelda’s VA is up there with “SPEEEEEEN LISTUN TOOE MEEEEI”

The CDI games are better than BOTWshit in every way including voice acting

It takes away from the magic

On the other hand, imagine Borderlands 3 without voice acting.

The problem wasn't the existence of voice acting, it was the quality. What the fuck were they thinking with zelda's casting? Every fucking line she spoke sounds like she couldn't decide if she was supposed to be crying or cumming.

No thanks. I don't want my player character talking back.

That idea falls as most of Nintendo's characters are already voiced. We know what they sound like, so nothing is left to the imagination.

Him not talking at this point does nothing but hold the cutscenes and other characters back.

It's doubly awkward when it's fully voiced. We can at least assume Link talks back (just not with boxes) in some cutscenes. There's even dialogue sometimes to suggest so. Can't do that with voiced scenes, so Link just stands there staring blankly as he gets talked at.

Link isn't "your player character". Since at least OoT, Link has been a separate entity from the player.

I just want Link to be a full character. With actual characteristics that's more than just being "the hero" with a few quirks tossed in.

Maybe it's a good thing fans don't have as much control over the series as they'd like.

Theyre autistic and if it changes from their routine they have a fit.

Read an interview with Breath of Fire 4's staff who had a similar response when that game was new-- but they also cited how when you have a mute hero, everyone ELSE has to talk more so they easily wind up becoming pushy jerks as they become the mouthpiece the player isn't.

It's funny because Link did talk a sparse few times in the older games. I swear he even talks in Majora's Mask when the old lady gets her bag stolen.

Link having his personality from the cartoon and the CDI games would be kino

i didnt mean to fuck ganon! i was just feeling insecure

I love the original Hyrule Warriors but it was awkward as shit when they'd have the cutscenes go the point of having lip movments and then impa_grunt.wav or zelda_giggle.wav comes out at a random time.

I think there's no reason to have silent protagonists anymore unless it's a choice-heavy RPG.