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(Little) Things that annoy you in Pokémon
- Thread starter BriarRose
- Start date
I'm gonna take this issue a step further: I truly think that budget & development time restrictions have little to no baring, or at the very least aren't enough to explain what's happening here.
I don't wanna downplay the craft of voice acting: I understand that there's a lot of hard work, training and care that goes into even just a decent performance. But there are licensed shovelware games that have implemented voice acting just fine! Here's the 2007 Transformers movie tie-in game with full VA for cutscenes... on the DS.
Every performance in these videos ranges from adequate to "oh my god they got Peter Cullen as Optimus/Frank Welker as Megatron". Now, do you think these games and countless others like them had endless money and time to go around? Because I guarantee that, say, Pokemon BW easily eclipsed them in both aspects. Like, how long does a full set of recording sessions for a game at Pokemon's scope even take? A month or two maximum? And it's not like development just freezes in the meantime. I don't even have to look outside this franchise, Pokemon Masters is right there! Again, the idea that Game Freak cannot match the personnel and pipeline for voice acting of the developers of the niche mobile game with spectacle levels barely above visual novel tier simply isn't credible.
It's a lack of willpower, simple as. Whoever makes the final call on these things either doesn't care about voice acting or actively does not want it for some arcane artistic reason, same reason Zelda dragged its feet until Breath of the Wild. "But they'd have to dub every language!" No lol just do English & Japanese w/ a toggle like every other Japanese game
I don't wanna downplay the craft of voice acting: I understand that there's a lot of hard work, training and care that goes into even just a decent performance. But there are licensed shovelware games that have implemented voice acting just fine! Here's the 2007 Transformers movie tie-in game with full VA for cutscenes... on the DS.
Every performance in these videos ranges from adequate to "oh my god they got Peter Cullen as Optimus/Frank Welker as Megatron". Now, do you think these games and countless others like them had endless money and time to go around? Because I guarantee that, say, Pokemon BW easily eclipsed them in both aspects. Like, how long does a full set of recording sessions for a game at Pokemon's scope even take? A month or two maximum? And it's not like development just freezes in the meantime. I don't even have to look outside this franchise, Pokemon Masters is right there! Again, the idea that Game Freak cannot match the personnel and pipeline for voice acting of the developers of the niche mobile game with spectacle levels barely above visual novel tier simply isn't credible.
It's a lack of willpower, simple as. Whoever makes the final call on these things either doesn't care about voice acting or actively does not want it for some arcane artistic reason, same reason Zelda dragged its feet until Breath of the Wild. "But they'd have to dub every language!" No lol just do English & Japanese w/ a toggle like every other Japanese game
The problem isn't actually getting voice acting for a few languages it's doing it for all of these and making them all good lol
Japanese, English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese
All of these would need dedicated teams, an entire department to maintain quality and make sure shit gets done on time, or
That Transformers game released in NA, EU and AUS so they did a few European languages, all of which romnance languages except German (I'm pretty sure?).
Lastly this is shovelware for a game that doesn't matter and that doesn't make it more impressive lol that means it matters less. Let me put this in simple terms, if the Spanish version of the dub isn't as good as the American one, a lot of people will be fucking pissed, say favoritism, and generally be more resentful of the brand.
Transformers devs don't have to worry because this is a fucking shovelware title that is going to be forgotten 3 days after the player plays it. Instead of just having one low-wage voice actor guy do a few takes of some generic lines in each region, each region would need to have an entire high-scale effort to maintain quality and not show favoritism, something that would make the brand look really fucking bad - worse than the people online who care about lack of voice acting.
Shovelware can do things that may seem to be higher effort on the surface because when you try to make things good it's actually significantly harder. Doing things badly is relatively easy, especially when you spare some cash.
If they did add voice acting it would probably not be in all languages and just be in either japanese or english only, much like how Dragon Quest does it.
And people would get way more pissed off at that than at no voice acting lol
Honestly no they wouldn't because, again, this is just what every Japanese game with voice-acting does. Hell some of them don't even get dubs and are JP audio only
100% of those aren't Pokemon, which is held to a different standard of being global and not just aimed towards specific audiences
Dragon Ball is also a global multimedia brand, particularly notable for its absolutely insane popularity in Latin American countries. To this day there is not a single DB game that has received a LatAm Spanish dub. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that if they did finally do one it would be a huge selling point and very hype for that fanbase, but I'm not aware of this being a recurring DiscourseTM point that comes up every time a new Dragon Ball videogame project is announced.
We don't live in the 90s anymore, normies are perfectly content with reading subtitles and outright preferring to do so is no longer a take limited to nerdy enthusiast circles.
>implying tomodachi life's bizarre text to speech isn't the pinnacle of SOVL
You know... I'm good without voice acting
take him to detroit.
This is Nintendo's voice synthesizer since the 3DS. Miitomo and Metroid Dread (for Adam orb) use it
You know... I'm good without voice acting
I don't even think GF has access to this tech
Unfortunately I do agree with ant4456 here.
Dragon Ball may not be dubbed in LatAm but has a lot of various dubs like italian, french, german, etc.
Pokemon is very similar in this regard. If Pokemon games were to launch with VA, and the main supported languages were not present, people would *riot*.
Ok, I kid, nobody would actually care let's be honest, it'd be the usual reddit shitshow for 2 weeks before everyone forgets, prolly someone will go under GameFreak's office with a knife again but that'll be it. But I can promise you that if they ever were to do voice acting and only do eng/jp, people will voice their disappointment, at least for a brief period.
It's like if they released a new anime season and declared "it's only coming out in english, rest of the countries we've always made dubs for please fuck yourselves and tell your kids they won't be able to see the next pokemon season"
What you're talking about are the actual mainline animes, which are simply in a medium with different standards. People are even more fine with Eng/JP only in videogames than in movies and TV, probably because unlike those understanding the details of the story isn't the be-all end-all. The Dragon Ball series get a bunch of different dubs, the games do not. Same deal with stuff like the Pokemon anime VS Masters.
I dunno man I'm just really not buying this idea that Eng/Jp voice acting implementation would be greeted with either outrage by left out regions or ignored and forgotten about. Only way to get a strong negative reaction would be if the english dub was of stunningly poor quality, like Big Green dub/PS1 Mega Man game tier
I think the main reason you'd see the outrage (which again, I repeat, would prolly last less than a month and be forgotten very quickly) is just due to how innately toxic the Pokemon online base is.
People will complain about *everything* in this series, and lack of localized dub is a perfect way to give them a excuse to do so served on a silver platter.
Dragon Ball videogame playerbase usually only buys the games to replay Goku's story for the 5000th time which they already know by memory, or because it's a fighting game and the dub is completely irrelevant as all you hear is screaming 90% of the time anyway.
(Which isn't me trashing on DB players/buyers, it's just what the average DB game is, I loved DBZ Kakarot and would gladly buy it again xd)
Pokemon online fanbase though... I mean... Do I really need to go over why I say they complain about literally everything and only look for excuses to trash on GameFreaks? On this board? IN THIS THREAD?
There's also the argument to be made they would start with some dubs and it'd come down to how high the demand for specific languages to receive them once the prospect of Voice Acting itself is even on the table. It's possible the relevant territories would only be concerned with LatAM Spanish for example if a voice cast was even an option for ANY version.
You joke, but those screams are dubbed by the respective casts and do influence peoples' preferred version of action scenes even with no dub dialogue (EX: Goku vs Beerus in BoG is extremely popular in English because of Sean Schemmel's shouting)I think the main reason you'd see the outrage (which again, I repeat, would prolly last less than a month and be forgotten very quickly) is just due to how innately toxic the Pokemon online base is.
People will complain about *everything* in this series, and lack of localized dub is a perfect way to give them a excuse to do so served on a silver platter.
Dragon Ball videogame playerbase usually only buys the games to replay Goku's story for the 5000th time which they already know by memory, or because it's a fighting game and the dub is completely irrelevant as all you hear is screaming 90% of the time anyway.
(Which isn't me trashing on DB players/buyers, it's just what the average DB game is, I loved DBZ Kakarot and would gladly buy it again xd)
Pokemon online fanbase though... I mean... Do I really need to go over why I say they complain about literally everything and only look for excuses to trash on GameFreaks? On this board? IN THIS THREAD?
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To be fair, it does make sense, but doesn't detract to my point I think
There would absolutely be no uproar whatsoever to only English and Japanese voices releasing lmao I really think you guys need to get out of your bubble. We, people from not English-speaking countries, are more than used to everything being dubbed on English but not our language. It isn't an expectation at all, far from it. It's always just a nice surprise if it's in the game. I never expect anything to be dubbed to Spanish. Hell, even most games made here are instead dubbed to English. It's the usual thing in the market to cater to more people. If I had to expect Spanish dub in most games to play them, I would be missing out even on high tier exclusives. I pretty much learned English because of being exposed to most media on it.
Elden Ring didn't get dub voices while Bloodborne did and people did not give a shit. Most gacha games who are insanely succesful only have English and Japanese voices (Nintendo ones included, even Pokemon Masters is right there!) and the only complain people have about that is when you can't change between them at will because Japanese sounds less cringe and cheesy since we don't understand what they are actually saying every time (and weeabos, of course). I have gotten people into Monster Hunter with the Wilds beta that setted the dub language to English or Japanese because we are not even used to Spanish dub by now (and again, sounds cheesy as fuck)
There is also a set of us who don't want voice acting at all, and in games like Monster Hunter have actually appreciated the option to go back to the made up gibberish. We don't want any dub, let alone a specific one. I literally hate Felynes talk now.
Gamers are absolutely used to subtitles. It's 2025. The people who want voice acting just so scenes look less ridiculous would not care it isn't a specific dub. We don't even have a Pokemon Center in Europe as a way to get merchandise consistently from the biggest brand in the world. You really think we are expecting a dub in our language? It took us until last month to get Horizons on Netflix here as well. We have no high expectations for media at all. The reddit echo chambers are not most real people.
Elden Ring didn't get dub voices while Bloodborne did and people did not give a shit. Most gacha games who are insanely succesful only have English and Japanese voices (Nintendo ones included, even Pokemon Masters is right there!) and the only complain people have about that is when you can't change between them at will because Japanese sounds less cringe and cheesy since we don't understand what they are actually saying every time (and weeabos, of course). I have gotten people into Monster Hunter with the Wilds beta that setted the dub language to English or Japanese because we are not even used to Spanish dub by now (and again, sounds cheesy as fuck)
There is also a set of us who don't want voice acting at all, and in games like Monster Hunter have actually appreciated the option to go back to the made up gibberish. We don't want any dub, let alone a specific one. I literally hate Felynes talk now.
Gamers are absolutely used to subtitles. It's 2025. The people who want voice acting just so scenes look less ridiculous would not care it isn't a specific dub. We don't even have a Pokemon Center in Europe as a way to get merchandise consistently from the biggest brand in the world. You really think we are expecting a dub in our language? It took us until last month to get Horizons on Netflix here as well. We have no high expectations for media at all. The reddit echo chambers are not most real people.
This is so ludicrously naive that I cannot believe it's sincere.
Most of the listed languages (plus Russian and Dutch, minus Korean and Chinese) were dubbed for Breath of the Wild. Nintendo already has the capacity to handle that kind of workload, and like other people said they don't even need to anyway.
Also implying that modern TPCi even gives enough of a shit to ensure every dub is good.
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Breath of the Wild has like 50 lines of read dialogue
Also it's dogshit and I haven't met someone who actually likes the voice acting in that game lol, they made a big deal about it and then it was so little of the game and it was awkward
Just get Veronica Taylor, Ted Lewis, Amy Birbaum, and Eric Stuart to dub some lines, that'll print money for the Eng side /hj
This debate is so nothing water, they had voices in fucking RSE with the Bard guy, they had D-O-G-A-R-S for BW2, they have VAs for Masters, a game heavily overseen by GF staff. FFS, Detective Pikachu 2 as attrociously obvious as it was that it was ported from 3DS has voice acting, it does not matter if it's mid or not
The point is, animating like they're fully speaking yet they're dead silent is awkward as shit. People have made other suggestions for bypassing language barrier (Sims-ing it), like it's not black white besides "GF, stop getting Creatures Inc to animate sequences that beg for vocals"
I will not give them leeway given how silly Gen 8's concert was, and Master's existence
This debate is so nothing water, they had voices in fucking RSE with the Bard guy, they had D-O-G-A-R-S for BW2, they have VAs for Masters, a game heavily overseen by GF staff. FFS, Detective Pikachu 2 as attrociously obvious as it was that it was ported from 3DS has voice acting, it does not matter if it's mid or not
The point is, animating like they're fully speaking yet they're dead silent is awkward as shit. People have made other suggestions for bypassing language barrier (
I will not give them leeway given how silly Gen 8's concert was, and Master's existence
just give mega audino regenerator pls
Bringing up Masters like it's fully voiced is a bit disingenuous, there are fully-voiced lines but the story dialogue is punctuated by minor interjections barring sentences they specifically want to put attention on.
Which is how I would expect main game Pokémon dubbing to work if it ever happened (possible voice grunting throughout the game for major characters, fully-voiced dialogue only for major cutscenes).
Which is how I would expect main game Pokémon dubbing to work if it ever happened (possible voice grunting throughout the game for major characters, fully-voiced dialogue only for major cutscenes).
Counter-proposal: All Pokemon games should have voice acting but only in the language(s) spoken in the region depicting. No matter whether you're playing L:ZA in Japan, the US, or Nairobi, the characters speak French and that's it.
The Tekken approach. I like it.