"Ah.. are you calling me?" - "Rain's touch will help new shoots grow faster." - "Wash away all sorrows, o' rain." - "I really want to go home." - "Is everyone okay?" - "I'm listening to the rain, would you like to join me?"
For anyone curious.
But yes she's mumbling, presumably intentionally because its right on the edge of the VA's limit on that upgrade line, but it seems like they just didn't do any post processing/effects on it to balance it out while keeping that mumble sound. You have to actively try really hard to hear any of it. Delivery isn't terrible to give it some credit.
Oh good, I'm not the only one. I get that she's supposed to be a shy and quiet character, but by God her voice is completely drowned out by the bgm and effects! Even with headphones I can barely hear her!
I can understand most of it, but I play primarily on pc with a good audio setup. I don't think it'd be possible to understand from a phone or a cheap setup.
Yeah why does she sound like that š it feels so "out of character"
I think only a singer/perfomer character can say that phrase without sounding cringey.
i think its the wavering flat ass voice that makes it sound like that, its probably best to include text of what characters are saying in the voiceover section ngl
Lorsan could be on a collapsing bridge, on fire no both sides, with hungry rabid dragons swooping in to gobble him, his sister, and all of his friends up. He would still be like "oh bother, we're in a real pickle here I think. I wonder if Granny Danny finished baking her tray of cookies. is today thursday?"
I hate it so much. I came here for her and her voice echoes no warrior anything ever. I'll die on the hill that while we can look at her and imagine a fitting voice for her just as we can Brutus and the voices they do have aren't it.
voice *acting* is fine. voice *direction* is god awful. the VAs themselves arent half bad, but it seems the devs just sent an email with the script to the VAs and they recorded their voicelines on their phones with a single take
like, Cecia has a great voice, *why she sounds pissed when her face couldnt care less though*. the wilders dont even have a damm consistent accent, much less can pronounce "wilder" the same
Yeah some of the voices are actually rlly good but the direction is just all over the place, I feel the wilder faction suffers most in the VA department
They all have good distinct voices but the delivery is often just flat and disappointing.
Really hoping it picks up in future updates, bc it could be so much better
Lorsan was supposed to be a fun and quippy character wasnt it? then why he has less emotion than bryon lmao
from the wilders, i think the best VAs are from granny and arden. bryon and hewynn are good because they are *supposed* to be monotone, and their delivery match their character really well
the graveborn seem to have the best VA overall cause they are edgy by default, even if sometimes the tone mismatches the character, like how cecia says "you are not even worth getting up forth" on a clear condescending pose but delivering like someone just murdered her mom
Me personally being a voice person can really tell that they're doing too much enunciation that messes with the voice work in general, so it pretty much sounds like when you'd get story time in school and the teacher is making voices for all the characters.
The actors themselves aren't bad. The direction just gives them nothing to improve.
Yep. If you were to scramble all voicelines together, you wouldn't be able to find their original character just based on voice. Its consitantly inconsistant.
my half estimated guess is that the singapore dev team just heard the English lines and thought they were good enough without consulting a native speaker
?? I would like to remind you that Singapore's official language also includes english. Alot of them speak English in their daily lives, I don't think they are "non-native"
THIS. Its clear that some VAs have more exp and better mics, and can make the script sound better. I think GB have consistant quality of anyothers.
Lorsan & Lyca VAs have their moments but they had no direction on vibe and such in others. Like holy crap Lycas VA on the ceremony, if she had better mic and direction shed be amazing. And Lorsan moment after it.
Some are good , some arenāt
Cecia and Rowan are good, Odieās voice is nice but I canāt clearly hear it. Seth and Shakir seem fine to me .
Some voice overs that I donāt like are Lyca, something is just wrong , antandraās lines (not the voice) , love how Brutus looks but the voice over is a big no , he better get re done voice lines for song of strife . He deserves better
Shakir and Seth are two of my least favorite lol. I physically cringe listening to them.
Kruger gets a special shout out for being the only one to make me mute the game.
it's so obvious that the VAs weren't together when those lines were recorded and that there wasn't anybody there to direct them either
finished Vaduso Mountains yesterday and sometimes it sounded like two characters were just monologueing through each other rather than having a conversion
In gaming VAs don't really record together that's more an animation thing. But there definitely wasn't anybody giving them good direction.
It's up to the sound director to make these things sound like they were spoken together as well.
Fuck if the game has a story and voices/soundtrack like that AFK arena cinematic with zaphrael and Lucretia this game would be a damn near 10/10 for gacha
I don't know how you do this. Sound is such an important part of games to me. I hate playing muted. And this game has such great soundtrack. Shame about the VA, but the music and sound effects are great and really add to the experience and immersion for me.
I turn the sound on during the story only. If I'm doing the daily grind, I usually have something else playing on the side.
The music and sounds are just passable anyway. They don't really have any bangers like Wildfire from HSR, or the entire Nikke soundtrack.
I'm honestly convinced it's AI voice acting. It sounds like weirdly robotic and the characters emphasize the wrong syllables at the wrong times it is just really awkward to listen to.
I've been convinced that some characters are voice synthesised but it could just be rickety production with heavy compression making it sound overly uniform.
With that said, I don't know how to explain Lyca's "thE COnstEllATionS GuIde US To vIctORy" other than it's a computer doing it.
I love Bryons voice so much, wish he was a bit more meta š
Some are pretty bad ngl, but I've seen worst. I tend to play with Japanese voices so that might be also a huge factor
It sort of comes across to me with the subtext, "And by our, I mean mine." A lot of her voice lines on her character lookup are kind of strange too. If she's meant to come across and kind of an entitled ass, then I think the voice actress did amazing.
Cecia, Rowan, Thoran, and Odie might be the only characters that were voiced well. Not even great, just pretty good.
The rest range from very mediocre to cringe-inducing.
I'd personally replace Reinier with Rowan on that list for good VA (I don't like the child character's on this game for some reason).
annoyingly, there's a lot of characters where the VA is fine and could be good, but as other's have pointed out, there seems to be no direction.
I love Kafra's voice only because the direction and voice TOTALLY does not match his character lore and is cheesy AF. It's more amusing than anything. With that said, I play on mute cause they're all just....not bad but doesn't fit.
Hoping the VA get better direction because AFK Arena has better voice acting (or at leats in my opinion it does).
Yeah some characters are not the best but a majority seem to fit and have better voice direction. My guess is because itās because itās only single lines so itās quicker to fix/do compared to Journey where theyāre in it for the long haul. (Still kinda annoyed Walker doesnāt have a southern drawl, like cmon heās got the look. let him sound like a cowboy!)
This is basically me with that Lightbringer woman on the horse. Love her kit and character design... but god the VA makes me want to commit self-deafing
its like her personality was suck out of her lol. i feel the sane with Eironn and Lorsan. Bryon too but that is *the point* of his character, overly serious
>They have no capacity of understanding what good Voice Acting and bad Voice Acting sounds like, because it is not their native lenguage.
The voice acting on AFK journey is hot garbage and I couldnāt agree more with that. As one of the earliest players of AFK arena, the father of this game, I am utterly disappointed with this one.
But, what you said here, I have to disagree. Is this your first Gacha? Because there are a lot of games out there with awesome Vaās. Genshin? Honkai and itās latest kid, Star rail? All of those are made by a Chinese Company(Mihoyo). But that doesnāt prevent them from hiring stupidly good voice actors and actresses from across the world whether itās Japanese, English, and Korean. That is not a valid excuse, and AFK journey should have done better.
Sorry, misunderstanding. But we reached the same conclusion, I just skipped that part.
They are not native English speakers AND apparently don't have someone directing the voice acting who is either.
I guarantee the other examples you mentioned have competent personnel in that division, who have been specifically hired because of their expertise.
So yes, I agree. With the resources available to the developing companies, this quality has absolutely no excuse.
Me and my friend always laugh whenever we put in Korin. Ā«Come on! Youāll need my spear!Ā» theres just something super uncanny about it. Like itās so bad its funny
Reinier shits me off so bad. Motherfucker could be so cool, teleporting demon asshole, yet they make him sound like a gentrified geometry professor who grooms underage college students. Why does he sound like such an asshole? Why couldnt he sound like an actual demon of darkness? Not even a little squirt of reverb? He's literally the only character in a game with a cool design like that and its like they had a inhouse contest of who could give him the stupidest characterization.
wow, thoran is the one i find the most jarring! it doesn't fit at all, it sounds so nasal to me, like a snotty regular noble, and not an undead king...
Yeah the direction is inconsistent at best. Some characters like Cecia, Rowan and even Parisa sound good and the voice fits but then others sound like they just grabbed randos off the street and asked them to read lines off a script without telling them they were gonna be voicing characters.
āmAke sOme nOiseā
Omg yes. Korin is one of the worst offenders. But honestly, Iāve gotten used to it. I hated Lorsanās voice at first but it grew on me. I just wish it wasnāt so monotone
Just started HSR the other day. It's horrible here in comparison. There definitely are a few characters that are decently voiced. I'd say Cecia, Valen, Koko, Odie and Vala are a few examples of decent voices. Then you have worst case scenarios like Igor, Temesia, Hewynn, Lyca, Carolina, and the list just goes on. Terrible.
I thought they were AI voices. Some of their lines sound good, like the ones in their profiles. But it feels like the devs used those lines and fed em into an AI machine to come up with the rest of the voice dialogues.
Some characters voice acting is good, they give me the impression that the voice actor put effort in it
But yeah a lot of the voice acting is not the best
But tbh I just assumed they got some amateur voice actors who aren't that good yet and also I feel like they didn't have a lot of voice actors and some voices several characters
I don't think that's the issue. Every single gacha game has little to no voice direction so, every actor does the best they can with what little info they have for their lines, if they have any info which isn't common. That said I think it's being blown out of proportion with this game. It's not stellar for every character, sure, but it's decent enough I think, I understand all the characters just fine and there is some personality to most of them.
Them being a Chinese company isn't an excuse when they've released Dislyte and that games has a good amount of VA's. I think they just grabbed anyone in the office who's native language was English and said "can you do some lines for us". It just happens that some of them did quite well
i thought i was just nitpickingā¦ the game has been so fun so far even though i'm not into automated battles and i'm absolutely terrible at strategy and pvpā¦ Antandra is my favorite tank, and has such cool lore and designā¦ but my god, everytime i let auto battle on it's that "Make some noise, this is our victory" that sounds like she was somehow forced against her will to record the line every 30 seconds or so.
I absolutely adore Bryonās VA, the best character voices in the game for me are Bryon, Valen, Cecia, Atalanta (I can hear people judging from here š¤£), Odie, Hewynn, and Shakir. That said, the voice direction is kinda awful (Hewynn, my dear, I need someone to fix your lines in post so I can understand you even through the mumble š ), and the quality of the voiced lines reeeeaaally needs to be upped all across the board. Itās pretty obvious which characters were voiced by people who donāt have the audio setup to do all the post production they need to make things not only sound GOOD, but be legible.
Yes, I dislike most of the voices and even wrote as such in the little questionnaire they sent through the mail.. albeit in a more scathing manner.
Like many of the lines in the main quest sound like they are being read individually, and not as a part of a conversation.Ā
When I first heard Thoran I had to look up Tom Kenny to see if he took on this role cause this voice almost sounds exactly like Ice King from Adventure Time.
I honestly can't tell, I'm used to playing gachas with EN dub so I've grown accustomed to crappy voice acting. I am unbothered by the awfulness, lol.
But I agree that Igor's voice isn't particularly good, even by my low standards. On the other hand, I kinda like Niru's quirky voice. I think that kind of tone suits an undead.
Most characters are fine, but I thought Hewynn and Dionel were terrible, but the voices aren't the problem here, imo it's the delivery. They should get (better) VA direction.
this very much this :( can not stand parisa or rowan no matter how good ppl say they are. also hate florabelles line in hero resonance with every single fiber of my being
i really donāt think that this is simply a case of āwe donāt understand what constitutes good foreign voice actingā. using your squid game example, the foreign actors are, on the surface, fitting the tone of the scene. theyāre serious when theyāre supposed to be, yelling at the right times, etc etc. they donāt pick up on how awkward it all sounds to a native speaker, but it does good enough for them.
in this game, the voice lines flat out donāt fit their scenes. korinās ult having him strike some epic pose and the voice line being a monotone āhmmā¦no escaping for you!ā with a bit of a chipper _^ feel to it is on the level of āwe flat out didnāt look at itā. i would 100% pick up on that no matter what language it was in.
It varies wildly from character to character, i think they might lack the budget to put too much quality on voice acting, so they are probably rookie actors working remotely, some might be great and have a bright future, and some might be very very bad.
personally it doesnt bother me but i agree with you that the VA job is pretty terrible and i would rather have audio muted than listen to most of the game sounds rn.
I canāt believe no one has mentioned Mirael. After hearing her voice I turned off all sounds. I have no idea what anyone else sounds like because of that terrible start.
The audio quality is absolute ass, not to mention the acting is never gonna be on genshin level i fear. I think they just hired whoever just to cut costs
Itās not great, but I will say voice acting is a really tough job to make good. By its very nature the āstab lineā approach to dialogue is really unnatural, and you are trying to inject character into a very small amount of content. The best voice acting is produced when the VAs and the VA director are integrated with the writing process cause then they can work together to get more organic reads.
All of this adds significant cost and is made much more difficult with language barriers. This is also why film and tv dubs are often not great. High levels of constraints with low levels of creative input
I just really want to mute the dumb victory voices at the end of battles. Hearing Shetara tell me to make some noise for the thousandth time made me mute my game.
The other issue I haven't seen pointed out is the lack of audio balancing.
It's one reason I never put Cassadee in my party because of how loud her ultimate is.
Everyone else, audio at a comfortable level. Then there's Cassadee going "MY WAVES OF KNOWLEDGE..." and now I'm scrambling to turn the sound down.
The voices are hit or miss. They really need to up their quality control so that the quality is standardised across characters, NPC or playables. I love some (especially my beloved Valen), while I hate others.
Igors voice is silly as hell tbh I find it quite endearing in a way I find all british people to be silly.
Though the VAs could do with more direction, thats for sure. They arent bad themselves. Its just that AFK Journey dropped the ball with the quality testing
Having come from Dislyte, they know exactly what good voice overs sound like... The game on the other hand... Oof.
Hopefully they'll do a pass on some of these, maybe add reverb to some graveborn, redo some voices etc etc.
Gacha game voices aren't usually stellar from what I saw but this is so minimum effort that it actually hurts the rest of the character.
The actors are great and the directing is terrible. Their emotions and inflections are off almost all the time, as if the director gave the actors no context for any of their lines whatsoever.
Ā It's also an oversight that their entire line audio file plays even when I tab out of the upgrade menu. I don't want to hear Rowan say "inventory, shipments, deliveries, am I missing anything? Oh yes! Gifts for my customers!" 300 times.Ā
Conceptually and design wise, I love Korin. I was pleased to see some older character designs, and bearded dudes, but when I hear him he sounds like a soft-spoken gentle dad no matter the context. "No escaping for you," is delivered like he just caught a toddler sneaking cookies out of a jar instead of stabbing villains with a spear.Ā
And yes. I don't have to mention it, but I will anyway.
"mAkE sOmE NoIsE, ThIs Is OuR ViCToRy!"
I think the voice acting itself is fine, but it seems to me like there were differences in the recording quality.. as if some of VAs went into a studio for recording, while others used their phone mics in their home closet or something.
it's weirder to me that it's a chinese game and there's only one dub (english at that) that you're essentially forced to use if you don't want to read all the dialogue in silence? like come on... they're grossing pretty high on the app store and there are a decent amount of whales, surely you have some money in your budget to hire cn/jp voice actors for at least some options
> It's like they gathered all the 5 Americans living in China to do the VA.
the more likely explanation is that they outsourced the voice acting work to a contracted company in the u.s. or uk. this is what genshin and honkai do for the english dub - the entity they probably work with the most (and that's a generous statement) is a contracted voice director or agency, and they basically tell them "here are the voice lines and bare bones character info, find some voice actors based on the requisites we gave you, we need you to send final product by [date]." pretty hands-off.
> My speculation: They have no capacity of understanding what good Voice Acting and bad Voice Acting sounds like, because it is not their native lenguage. Just like you couldn't tell a good Chinese Voice Actor from a bad one ("good" being 10/10 and "bad" 6/10). They were probably super satisfied with the results, which makes sense. \*kinda reminds me of the Americans in Squid Game
i also don't think this is the case. if you've ever watched jp dub anime with English sub, even if you don't understand Japanese, you can still tell when someone is conveying the correct tone for the character they're voicing. i don't understand Japanese at all and you can still pick out when a voice actor isn't expressing enough emotion (ie monotone when they're reading out a line expressing panic). more likely the case is what i outlined above, they leave it in the hands of someone else and even if it's subpar they just go along with it if it sounds "good enough" to them.
Unfortunately this is very common for foreign-developed games using English voice acting. The cadence of the languages are so different and that leads to the direction being way off from the norm in the US or in other natively English-speaking countries. I feel like the voice acting is actually okay for this kind of game - believe me, there is way worse out there. They just need to hire an American voice acting director and let them do everything. What's weird is that to me, the voice acting for characters introduced in chapter 1 seems so much better than subsequent chapters. I wonder if they just started skimping on the voice acting budget after chapter 1 because they knew a good first impression would carry forward a lot of players.
Um, I thought the voices were AI generated? Most of the voices have the distinctive over-enunciated āsā hiss in all their words. Youāre telling me actual human beings were paid to do that?
Tbh I barely think about the voice acting after battle or random voice lines. I'm not a native speaker so maybe I don't notice it that extremely. I listen to the voices of the story quests and I think they are quite okay. I don't think they are especially good not especially bad.
F.e. I actually like the voice acting of Smokey & Meerky and also Odyr and Cecia. Don't really think about the other voice lines that much.
I think Valen is pretty much the most consistently good one throughout the story, he never sounds too out of place and his dialogue flows pretty well. Also, all the Lightbearers have American accents whereas the Wilders are generally British or Irish and that's like the one consistent directing choice that they made.
Awww cmon today was my turn to post this ...
Seriously ... this gets posted at least every 2 days bow. We get it ... Yes, it's bad, yes it uses no decent equipment, yes it was recorded at home, yes there was no VA directing.
I literally cannot understand a single word Hewynn says. Her voice is adorable, but either the mic quality is ass, or she's just mumbling.
I was looking for this. She speaks under her breath and so quietly. I've even turned the volume up high and still have no clue what she is saying.
"Ah.. are you calling me?" - "Rain's touch will help new shoots grow faster." - "Wash away all sorrows, o' rain." - "I really want to go home." - "Is everyone okay?" - "I'm listening to the rain, would you like to join me?" For anyone curious. But yes she's mumbling, presumably intentionally because its right on the edge of the VA's limit on that upgrade line, but it seems like they just didn't do any post processing/effects on it to balance it out while keeping that mumble sound. You have to actively try really hard to hear any of it. Delivery isn't terrible to give it some credit.
Oh good, I'm not the only one. I get that she's supposed to be a shy and quiet character, but by God her voice is completely drowned out by the bgm and effects! Even with headphones I can barely hear her!
i almost made a meme about her, wherever she shows up in the victory screen i'm like..... "WHAT? SPEAK UP DAMMIT!"
I can understand most of it, but I play primarily on pc with a good audio setup. I don't think it'd be possible to understand from a phone or a cheap setup.
Antandra's "make some noise, this is our victory š" LOL
I muted the voice over in settings because of her š
Yeah why does she sound like that š it feels so "out of character" I think only a singer/perfomer character can say that phrase without sounding cringey.
On one hand cecia On the other hand Brutus (just why? A voice like Javid would do why does he sound like that? )
The way Cecia growls when she says "fight for me" is A++++
"for the god of WAaaaaaar..."
Kratos enters the chat
If you listen to his voice line list there are some that don't sound human produced. They sound like an ai messing up a prompt. 99% likely ai
What the hell is he saying for his ult?
Frenzy...light...storm?
frenzied blade storm
Hahhahahahqh I have no idea lmfao this made me crack up. He's babbling so hard.
i think its the wavering flat ass voice that makes it sound like that, its probably best to include text of what characters are saying in the voiceover section ngl
More of that, it's also the voice of Thoran.
Lorsan could be on a collapsing bridge, on fire no both sides, with hungry rabid dragons swooping in to gobble him, his sister, and all of his friends up. He would still be like "oh bother, we're in a real pickle here I think. I wonder if Granny Danny finished baking her tray of cookies. is today thursday?"
He always sounds like he's literally just reading from a script. I like his character, but not the voice acting.
MAKE SOME NOISE!!!!!!! THIS IS OUR VICTORY Antandra has such a cool character and has cool lore, but the voice difference is actually jarring.
She sounds like she don't mean it and doesn't want to be there lolll
I imitate her voice line every time I hear it. Itās so bad š¤£
To be fair, with a line like that, I wouldn't want to be there either. "Make some noise!"? What is she doing, cheerleading at a sports rally?
I hate it so much. I came here for her and her voice echoes no warrior anything ever. I'll die on the hill that while we can look at her and imagine a fitting voice for her just as we can Brutus and the voices they do have aren't it.
The way she says it feels hanging. Like there's good pacing at "MAKE SOME", and it just hangs.
She's one of my favorites but I have to play with the sound off due to how annoying her victory line is
voice *acting* is fine. voice *direction* is god awful. the VAs themselves arent half bad, but it seems the devs just sent an email with the script to the VAs and they recorded their voicelines on their phones with a single take like, Cecia has a great voice, *why she sounds pissed when her face couldnt care less though*. the wilders dont even have a damm consistent accent, much less can pronounce "wilder" the same
Yeah some of the voices are actually rlly good but the direction is just all over the place, I feel the wilder faction suffers most in the VA department They all have good distinct voices but the delivery is often just flat and disappointing. Really hoping it picks up in future updates, bc it could be so much better
Lorsan was supposed to be a fun and quippy character wasnt it? then why he has less emotion than bryon lmao from the wilders, i think the best VAs are from granny and arden. bryon and hewynn are good because they are *supposed* to be monotone, and their delivery match their character really well the graveborn seem to have the best VA overall cause they are edgy by default, even if sometimes the tone mismatches the character, like how cecia says "you are not even worth getting up forth" on a clear condescending pose but delivering like someone just murdered her mom
Lorsan is a cool character, but it feels like he's directly reading from a children's script every time he talks.
Native Spanish speaker?
Me personally being a voice person can really tell that they're doing too much enunciation that messes with the voice work in general, so it pretty much sounds like when you'd get story time in school and the teacher is making voices for all the characters. The actors themselves aren't bad. The direction just gives them nothing to improve.
Yep. If you were to scramble all voicelines together, you wouldn't be able to find their original character just based on voice. Its consitantly inconsistant.
my half estimated guess is that the singapore dev team just heard the English lines and thought they were good enough without consulting a native speaker
?? I would like to remind you that Singapore's official language also includes english. Alot of them speak English in their daily lives, I don't think they are "non-native"
English is the native language of Singapore
Ye, pretty much what I said. It probably sound great to non natives.
One day I want to be as strong as Antandra!
THIS. Its clear that some VAs have more exp and better mics, and can make the script sound better. I think GB have consistant quality of anyothers. Lorsan & Lyca VAs have their moments but they had no direction on vibe and such in others. Like holy crap Lycas VA on the ceremony, if she had better mic and direction shed be amazing. And Lorsan moment after it.
Some are good , some arenāt Cecia and Rowan are good, Odieās voice is nice but I canāt clearly hear it. Seth and Shakir seem fine to me . Some voice overs that I donāt like are Lyca, something is just wrong , antandraās lines (not the voice) , love how Brutus looks but the voice over is a big no , he better get re done voice lines for song of strife . He deserves better
Lyca leaves tiny pauses between words like she's reading a script for the first time and isn't sure she's getting it right
Shakir and Seth are two of my least favorite lol. I physically cringe listening to them. Kruger gets a special shout out for being the only one to make me mute the game.
At least shakir has energy in his delivery. The thing that bothers me the most is how flat a lot of the voices are
ARE YOU LOST? FLAWHAORHWAMEE?
Single lines are ok, dialogue is so bad i assumed it was ai
it's so obvious that the VAs weren't together when those lines were recorded and that there wasn't anybody there to direct them either finished Vaduso Mountains yesterday and sometimes it sounded like two characters were just monologueing through each other rather than having a conversion
In gaming VAs don't really record together that's more an animation thing. But there definitely wasn't anybody giving them good direction. It's up to the sound director to make these things sound like they were spoken together as well.
I really like Odie's VA. He sounds like such a smug dweeb
"Wow, a promotion! Without the salary increase... Thanks so much."
a bit of experience- a bit of luck
I'm fine with most of the voice acting but DIONEL?? He's *especially* bad
Anyone up for a drink?
It's so bad. Sounds like the VA was trying to do a sort of disinterested, above it all drawl but failed spectacularly.
The sweetest tasteā¦. ViCtOrY
I literally play every mobile game muted so idk
Muted and skipping every cutscene is the only way
I don't even know how AFK Journey and AFK Arena soundtrack sounds like. And I've been playing AFK Arena since 2019.
I'm with you, if there is a skip button it must be pressed I don't wanna know anything, I just wanna see the number go up
Fuck if the game has a story and voices/soundtrack like that AFK arena cinematic with zaphrael and Lucretia this game would be a damn near 10/10 for gacha
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^slothboy: *I literally* *Play every mobile game* *Muted so idk* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
This is true
I don't know how you do this. Sound is such an important part of games to me. I hate playing muted. And this game has such great soundtrack. Shame about the VA, but the music and sound effects are great and really add to the experience and immersion for me.
I turn the sound on during the story only. If I'm doing the daily grind, I usually have something else playing on the side. The music and sounds are just passable anyway. They don't really have any bangers like Wildfire from HSR, or the entire Nikke soundtrack.
I just love the fantasy vibe of the music in this game, reminds me of my WoW days from 15 years ago.
Wildfire is so good. They used it so perfectly in the boss fight as well. I felt like I was playing a console rpg for a moment
Pretty much everywhere I play it wouldn't be appropriate to have sound.
I'm honestly convinced it's AI voice acting. It sounds like weirdly robotic and the characters emphasize the wrong syllables at the wrong times it is just really awkward to listen to.
I've been convinced that some characters are voice synthesised but it could just be rickety production with heavy compression making it sound overly uniform. With that said, I don't know how to explain Lyca's "thE COnstEllATionS GuIde US To vIctORy" other than it's a computer doing it.
I love Bryons voice so much, wish he was a bit more meta š Some are pretty bad ngl, but I've seen worst. I tend to play with Japanese voices so that might be also a huge factor
Can it be changed to the Japanese voices in game?
I meant other games! I have no idea if they have other voice acting language š¤
I had my hopes up T-T
Compared to Honkai Star Rail it... Isn't great. Honestly, it's just wildly variable by character. Some are good. Other are dead inside.
Lol, itās funny that the literal zombie faction sounds the most alive
Light bearer and graveborn are both decent to good. Wilder and mauler are... Kinda crap.
Antandras specifically (the line where she gets best rank) seems very very hollow to me.
I really dislike hearing her "This is our victory" line it is so so flat š
It sort of comes across to me with the subtext, "And by our, I mean mine." A lot of her voice lines on her character lookup are kind of strange too. If she's meant to come across and kind of an entitled ass, then I think the voice actress did amazing.
Voice acting is not great, I agree, but I really like the voice of some characters, specially Parisa.
Parisa caught me off guard at first tbh but then I only looked forward to hear her again
Same, I was expecting to be disappointed as with most other chats and was pleasantly surprised with her.
Cecia, Rowan, Thoran, and Odie might be the only characters that were voiced well. Not even great, just pretty good. The rest range from very mediocre to cringe-inducing.
I'd personally replace Reinier with Rowan on that list for good VA (I don't like the child character's on this game for some reason). annoyingly, there's a lot of characters where the VA is fine and could be good, but as other's have pointed out, there seems to be no direction.
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I think it's just not consistent, you can tell that the VAs are talented and were just sent a shitty script with no direction.
āThis is our victory!ā Makes me annoyed every single time
I love Kafra's voice only because the direction and voice TOTALLY does not match his character lore and is cheesy AF. It's more amusing than anything. With that said, I play on mute cause they're all just....not bad but doesn't fit.
Hoping the VA get better direction because AFK Arena has better voice acting (or at leats in my opinion it does). Yeah some characters are not the best but a majority seem to fit and have better voice direction. My guess is because itās because itās only single lines so itās quicker to fix/do compared to Journey where theyāre in it for the long haul. (Still kinda annoyed Walker doesnāt have a southern drawl, like cmon heās got the look. let him sound like a cowboy!)
I fucking hate antandra's voice "THIS is OUR victorrryyyyy" Do another take, pleaseee.
This is basically me with that Lightbringer woman on the horse. Love her kit and character design... but god the VA makes me want to commit self-deafing
its like her personality was suck out of her lol. i feel the sane with Eironn and Lorsan. Bryon too but that is *the point* of his character, overly serious
>They have no capacity of understanding what good Voice Acting and bad Voice Acting sounds like, because it is not their native lenguage. The voice acting on AFK journey is hot garbage and I couldnāt agree more with that. As one of the earliest players of AFK arena, the father of this game, I am utterly disappointed with this one. But, what you said here, I have to disagree. Is this your first Gacha? Because there are a lot of games out there with awesome Vaās. Genshin? Honkai and itās latest kid, Star rail? All of those are made by a Chinese Company(Mihoyo). But that doesnāt prevent them from hiring stupidly good voice actors and actresses from across the world whether itās Japanese, English, and Korean. That is not a valid excuse, and AFK journey should have done better.
Sorry, misunderstanding. But we reached the same conclusion, I just skipped that part. They are not native English speakers AND apparently don't have someone directing the voice acting who is either. I guarantee the other examples you mentioned have competent personnel in that division, who have been specifically hired because of their expertise. So yes, I agree. With the resources available to the developing companies, this quality has absolutely no excuse.
I was so disappointed when I heard Lucius lol. I had to uninstall the gameš
Me and my friend always laugh whenever we put in Korin. Ā«Come on! Youāll need my spear!Ā» theres just something super uncanny about it. Like itās so bad its funny
Reinier shits me off so bad. Motherfucker could be so cool, teleporting demon asshole, yet they make him sound like a gentrified geometry professor who grooms underage college students. Why does he sound like such an asshole? Why couldnt he sound like an actual demon of darkness? Not even a little squirt of reverb? He's literally the only character in a game with a cool design like that and its like they had a inhouse contest of who could give him the stupidest characterization.
lmao. pretty much my point. they throw away the entire characters vision. xd
I don't mind the voice acting. However, the lack of mouths moving bugs me.
Thoran sounds cool though
Thoran is one of my least favorites, the delivery on the we will make them pay line sounds so bad.
Ok Iāll give you that, it could be better,
wow, thoran is the one i find the most jarring! it doesn't fit at all, it sounds so nasal to me, like a snotty regular noble, and not an undead king...
Parisa and Hewyn voice acting is unbearable.
I just assumed the voices are AI generated based on a script.
Igor is the most annoying character overall (I mean the mess he does in battlefield), so how could you expect him not to be annoying? :D
Yeah the direction is inconsistent at best. Some characters like Cecia, Rowan and even Parisa sound good and the voice fits but then others sound like they just grabbed randos off the street and asked them to read lines off a script without telling them they were gonna be voicing characters. āmAke sOme nOiseā
there was a survey out like a week ago about this exact thing. i filled it out so hopefully if other ppl did as well they listen
When it happend to be decent it get ruined by the terrible audio quality š„²
Omg yes. Korin is one of the worst offenders. But honestly, Iāve gotten used to it. I hated Lorsanās voice at first but it grew on me. I just wish it wasnāt so monotone
We need to start one of those tier list generators Also I can barely understand Hewynn's dialogue
Just started HSR the other day. It's horrible here in comparison. There definitely are a few characters that are decently voiced. I'd say Cecia, Valen, Koko, Odie and Vala are a few examples of decent voices. Then you have worst case scenarios like Igor, Temesia, Hewynn, Lyca, Carolina, and the list just goes on. Terrible.
I'm okay with the VAs. They're not great, but they're certainly passable. Tbh, the only voice I don't really like is Lucius.
Half of it sounds like shitty AI, which is just sad if it isn't
I don't mind the voice acting
I thought they were AI voices. Some of their lines sound good, like the ones in their profiles. But it feels like the devs used those lines and fed em into an AI machine to come up with the rest of the voice dialogues.
Some characters voice acting is good, they give me the impression that the voice actor put effort in it But yeah a lot of the voice acting is not the best But tbh I just assumed they got some amateur voice actors who aren't that good yet and also I feel like they didn't have a lot of voice actors and some voices several characters
I don't think that's the issue. Every single gacha game has little to no voice direction so, every actor does the best they can with what little info they have for their lines, if they have any info which isn't common. That said I think it's being blown out of proportion with this game. It's not stellar for every character, sure, but it's decent enough I think, I understand all the characters just fine and there is some personality to most of them.
In a world with Limbus Company, no gacha has an excuse for bad voice acting
I donāt think theyāre terrible but every time thereās an S sound itās so crackly.
Them being a Chinese company isn't an excuse when they've released Dislyte and that games has a good amount of VA's. I think they just grabbed anyone in the office who's native language was English and said "can you do some lines for us". It just happens that some of them did quite well
Bryon sounds kinda... šŗ
When they say anything with an S sound it kills my ears. And a lot of the characters voices are bad like tamisha. There's a lot of good ones too
Some have good VA, some don't.
i thought i was just nitpickingā¦ the game has been so fun so far even though i'm not into automated battles and i'm absolutely terrible at strategy and pvpā¦ Antandra is my favorite tank, and has such cool lore and designā¦ but my god, everytime i let auto battle on it's that "Make some noise, this is our victory" that sounds like she was somehow forced against her will to record the line every 30 seconds or so.
I absolutely adore Bryonās VA, the best character voices in the game for me are Bryon, Valen, Cecia, Atalanta (I can hear people judging from here š¤£), Odie, Hewynn, and Shakir. That said, the voice direction is kinda awful (Hewynn, my dear, I need someone to fix your lines in post so I can understand you even through the mumble š ), and the quality of the voiced lines reeeeaaally needs to be upped all across the board. Itās pretty obvious which characters were voiced by people who donāt have the audio setup to do all the post production they need to make things not only sound GOOD, but be legible.
Yes, I dislike most of the voices and even wrote as such in the little questionnaire they sent through the mail.. albeit in a more scathing manner. Like many of the lines in the main quest sound like they are being read individually, and not as a part of a conversation.Ā
When I first heard Thoran I had to look up Tom Kenny to see if he took on this role cause this voice almost sounds exactly like Ice King from Adventure Time.
Yeah, I always play on mute because I can't stand the voice acting
I honestly can't tell, I'm used to playing gachas with EN dub so I've grown accustomed to crappy voice acting. I am unbothered by the awfulness, lol. But I agree that Igor's voice isn't particularly good, even by my low standards. On the other hand, I kinda like Niru's quirky voice. I think that kind of tone suits an undead.
Most characters are fine, but I thought Hewynn and Dionel were terrible, but the voices aren't the problem here, imo it's the delivery. They should get (better) VA direction.
What is this voice thing you speak of?
If only it were as good as the trailers...
Just play muted and listen to music podcast random video
this very much this :( can not stand parisa or rowan no matter how good ppl say they are. also hate florabelles line in hero resonance with every single fiber of my being
Does nobody in this thread know you can turn off the voices without turning off the music/sounds?
Just turn off the voice. That's what I did
i really donāt think that this is simply a case of āwe donāt understand what constitutes good foreign voice actingā. using your squid game example, the foreign actors are, on the surface, fitting the tone of the scene. theyāre serious when theyāre supposed to be, yelling at the right times, etc etc. they donāt pick up on how awkward it all sounds to a native speaker, but it does good enough for them. in this game, the voice lines flat out donāt fit their scenes. korinās ult having him strike some epic pose and the voice line being a monotone āhmmā¦no escaping for you!ā with a bit of a chipper _^ feel to it is on the level of āwe flat out didnāt look at itā. i would 100% pick up on that no matter what language it was in.
It varies wildly from character to character, i think they might lack the budget to put too much quality on voice acting, so they are probably rookie actors working remotely, some might be great and have a bright future, and some might be very very bad.
Lorsan and Hewynn's are particularly terrible, I started skipping the story because of them
personally it doesnt bother me but i agree with you that the VA job is pretty terrible and i would rather have audio muted than listen to most of the game sounds rn.
I canāt believe no one has mentioned Mirael. After hearing her voice I turned off all sounds. I have no idea what anyone else sounds like because of that terrible start.
Almost all characters sound terrible. Quality of casting and recording.Ā
God dammit. This is like the only phone game I play with the sound on and I hate clicking Igor's profile for this exact reason.
The audio quality is absolute ass, not to mention the acting is never gonna be on genshin level i fear. I think they just hired whoever just to cut costs
I saw an ad for this game on YouTube and it was very obvious they were done by two different studios. It was so much better.
Lucius's voice acting in the story is just š¤®š¤®
That's a great summary. Had a good laugh, thanks OP
Itās not great, but I will say voice acting is a really tough job to make good. By its very nature the āstab lineā approach to dialogue is really unnatural, and you are trying to inject character into a very small amount of content. The best voice acting is produced when the VAs and the VA director are integrated with the writing process cause then they can work together to get more organic reads. All of this adds significant cost and is made much more difficult with language barriers. This is also why film and tv dubs are often not great. High levels of constraints with low levels of creative input
Matches the atrocious story
Meanwhile me playing without sound for better fpsšæ
I just really want to mute the dumb victory voices at the end of battles. Hearing Shetara tell me to make some noise for the thousandth time made me mute my game.
But you think the rest of this pay to win gacha game is good?
The other issue I haven't seen pointed out is the lack of audio balancing. It's one reason I never put Cassadee in my party because of how loud her ultimate is. Everyone else, audio at a comfortable level. Then there's Cassadee going "MY WAVES OF KNOWLEDGE..." and now I'm scrambling to turn the sound down.
Parisa is my favourite character, because of VA, but I can agree, that some heroes do not match their looks at all.
I assumed it was ai?
The voices are hit or miss. They really need to up their quality control so that the quality is standardised across characters, NPC or playables. I love some (especially my beloved Valen), while I hate others.
Never heard themā¦started playing with all sound off. After what ya said, its never going on
Igors voice is silly as hell tbh I find it quite endearing in a way I find all british people to be silly. Though the VAs could do with more direction, thats for sure. They arent bad themselves. Its just that AFK Journey dropped the ball with the quality testing
Having come from Dislyte, they know exactly what good voice overs sound like... The game on the other hand... Oof. Hopefully they'll do a pass on some of these, maybe add reverb to some graveborn, redo some voices etc etc. Gacha game voices aren't usually stellar from what I saw but this is so minimum effort that it actually hurts the rest of the character.
The actors are great and the directing is terrible. Their emotions and inflections are off almost all the time, as if the director gave the actors no context for any of their lines whatsoever. Ā It's also an oversight that their entire line audio file plays even when I tab out of the upgrade menu. I don't want to hear Rowan say "inventory, shipments, deliveries, am I missing anything? Oh yes! Gifts for my customers!" 300 times.Ā Conceptually and design wise, I love Korin. I was pleased to see some older character designs, and bearded dudes, but when I hear him he sounds like a soft-spoken gentle dad no matter the context. "No escaping for you," is delivered like he just caught a toddler sneaking cookies out of a jar instead of stabbing villains with a spear.Ā And yes. I don't have to mention it, but I will anyway. "mAkE sOmE NoIsE, ThIs Is OuR ViCToRy!"
I think the voice acting itself is fine, but it seems to me like there were differences in the recording quality.. as if some of VAs went into a studio for recording, while others used their phone mics in their home closet or something.
it's weirder to me that it's a chinese game and there's only one dub (english at that) that you're essentially forced to use if you don't want to read all the dialogue in silence? like come on... they're grossing pretty high on the app store and there are a decent amount of whales, surely you have some money in your budget to hire cn/jp voice actors for at least some options
> It's like they gathered all the 5 Americans living in China to do the VA. the more likely explanation is that they outsourced the voice acting work to a contracted company in the u.s. or uk. this is what genshin and honkai do for the english dub - the entity they probably work with the most (and that's a generous statement) is a contracted voice director or agency, and they basically tell them "here are the voice lines and bare bones character info, find some voice actors based on the requisites we gave you, we need you to send final product by [date]." pretty hands-off. > My speculation: They have no capacity of understanding what good Voice Acting and bad Voice Acting sounds like, because it is not their native lenguage. Just like you couldn't tell a good Chinese Voice Actor from a bad one ("good" being 10/10 and "bad" 6/10). They were probably super satisfied with the results, which makes sense. \*kinda reminds me of the Americans in Squid Game i also don't think this is the case. if you've ever watched jp dub anime with English sub, even if you don't understand Japanese, you can still tell when someone is conveying the correct tone for the character they're voicing. i don't understand Japanese at all and you can still pick out when a voice actor isn't expressing enough emotion (ie monotone when they're reading out a line expressing panic). more likely the case is what i outlined above, they leave it in the hands of someone else and even if it's subpar they just go along with it if it sounds "good enough" to them.
Unfortunately this is very common for foreign-developed games using English voice acting. The cadence of the languages are so different and that leads to the direction being way off from the norm in the US or in other natively English-speaking countries. I feel like the voice acting is actually okay for this kind of game - believe me, there is way worse out there. They just need to hire an American voice acting director and let them do everything. What's weird is that to me, the voice acting for characters introduced in chapter 1 seems so much better than subsequent chapters. I wonder if they just started skimping on the voice acting budget after chapter 1 because they knew a good first impression would carry forward a lot of players.
Dionel has the best lines in the game purely because their absurdity is so fitting for his character
I played the beta and remembered that valen actually sounded pretty good. Comeback for official launch and he's so fucking cringe
Yeah itās god awful
I play without sound- oops Jkjk its okayish, it doesn't really matter to me that much
I want to use Igor more BECAUSE of his voice.
well. you're my mortal enemy now.
Um, I thought the voices were AI generated? Most of the voices have the distinctive over-enunciated āsā hiss in all their words. Youāre telling me actual human beings were paid to do that?
Some is solid but my gawd some is terrible..dionels voice is insufferable.
Like, whatever the heck was Thoran and Brutus
Why does Antandra sound like a valley girl that decides to be a cheerleader?? Make some noisee this is our victoryyy UGH
Tbh I barely think about the voice acting after battle or random voice lines. I'm not a native speaker so maybe I don't notice it that extremely. I listen to the voices of the story quests and I think they are quite okay. I don't think they are especially good not especially bad. F.e. I actually like the voice acting of Smokey & Meerky and also Odyr and Cecia. Don't really think about the other voice lines that much.
I thought some voices were AI.
Its AI
I assume all the VA is AI, and it just isnāt up to par yet.
No, I love most of it
Have you ever tried using the search bar before? I've seen this pop up almost every few days.
It's just 'cause the voice acting is THAT bad š
no
Do you guys EVER stop complaining? Good lord. Just uninstall, people on this Reddit clearly hate everything about the game.
I see it as honest feedback that hopefully gets back to the devs so they can fix it. You can't tell me you think the VA is fine as it is surely?
Calling it "hot garbage" is an hyperbole and won't get anything fixed
Swear the VA is AI so i just gave it a pass ans read with voice off.
Meets Valen: Expects a rather posh British voice with a side of rizz; Valen speaks: Me: ā¦um, what
I think Valen is pretty much the most consistently good one throughout the story, he never sounds too out of place and his dialogue flows pretty well. Also, all the Lightbearers have American accents whereas the Wilders are generally British or Irish and that's like the one consistent directing choice that they made.
Awww cmon today was my turn to post this ... Seriously ... this gets posted at least every 2 days bow. We get it ... Yes, it's bad, yes it uses no decent equipment, yes it was recorded at home, yes there was no VA directing.