Yeah, agree with this. Have been capturing footage for some Dojo social media stuff lately, and honestly Corey is one of the better actors in the first game and shines most during the cutscenes because he's got a contextual visual to work with.As somebody who spent the best part of a decade working in radio and television before moving to Japan, it seems pretty clear that the real issue is a lack of direction. To be clear, I don’t blame the English director for that, as I think they too were faced with a lot of the same issues as Corey. Poor direction from their Japanese counterparts, a complete lack of context for certain scenes and nowhere near enough time to work with the talent.
It’s for this reason that it bothered me a bit to learn that they didn’t allow Corey to at least audition for the role in the Anime as I think that it should be clear to anybody who’s ever worked with talent that Corey has it. Granted, it doesn’t shine through often enough in the games, but I’m fairly certain that a good director could coax it out of him if needed. Part of me gets why they went straight for the recast (as mentioned above, many see Corey as part of the reason that the English dub is a joke), but given all that he’s done for the franchise I think he deserved a chance to prove himself.
Agreed, although I think the bigger issue comes from how rigid the localization is in general. In Japan, for example, it’s normal to tell somebody that you understand them when they tell you something (Wakarimashita, Kashikomarimashita, etc). We do this in the west too, but to nowhere near the same extent and certainly not in some of the situations we see it used in the game. Worse still, this was translated to “I see,” which, although technically accurate, sounds completely ridiculous in a lot of the situations it’s used. With that in mind, it’s hard to see how any voice actor (or the person directing them, for that matter) could have made that sound natural when in reality a westerner would just never have said it.I think in general the best way for Ryo to work in English *for ANY actor* is to ditch "he's very Japanese" as direction and focus on the actual characterisation through his actions to loosen the performance up.
Nah. That's kind of a mix between fact and fiction in the sense that Ryo has always been described as a very "Japanese" person when we've heard anecdotes about how Japanese staff explained the character to Corey and Bill Black, and how it has resulted in some stiff characterisation. I doubt anybody has ever knowingly asked for a stilted performance.Correct me if im wrong, but wasn't it Suzuki who wanted the voices to sound like stilted stoic robots?
In that he is to be Japanese and come across as stern and stoic. No nonsense. And, for an English actor that is harder to convey in terms of sounding of vows etc. Being someone who has played the Japanese and english dub its noticeable the difference in delivery alone. It forces an English actor to be dry. Which is again likely accounted for in direction. What should be told to him when voicing his lines is that Ryo is very no-nonsense and he is on a mission and determined. But, he has emotion and puts emotion into it. Not sure why the direction for the English dub was made difficult.wait I'm lost, what do you guys mean by "very Japanese"