Question about Japanese dubbing in the new Shenmue II port

mjqjazzbar

mjqjazzbar

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On one of the streams with Adam and James, they discussed how it'd be very difficult to add an improved dub (from a sound quality perspective) to either game, if one exists, due to hardware/software constraints. My question is: did a Japanese dub for Shenmue 2 Xbox ever exist? I don't recall Shenmue II releasing for the Xbox outside of the US. Why would it be any easier to include the Japanese dub in the new Shenmue 2 port, which is based on the Xbox build, than it would be to include upgraded audio?

I am a complete layman, so I apologize for the possibly very stupid question.
 
The "upgraded" audio might not exist anymore. I'm hoping you mean the source audio files that were directly recorded by the voice actors.

Usually, if you can gain access to that, you wouldn't go around messing with compressed and proprietary formats found on actual game discs. But alas, they did exactly this, which leads me to believe that they lost the audio but somehow kept the source to the game.
 
That's what I mean, I guess! There were rumors flying the uncompressed audio files still existed because the Sega Kart Racing game with Ryo apparently uses improved audio samples for Ryo.
 
It's possible.

Just curious if the notion it'd be technologically impossible (were the voice recordings to exist) or "too complicated," as suggested in those vids, is true when considering D3T was able to use the Japanese voice acting in a port that never featured Japanese voice acting.
 
There was never an Xbox Shenmue II with Japanese in it and it's safe to say that there were never any plans to release it in that fashion. On a side note, the Xbox version got a release in Europe too, wich means that we actually got the best Shenmue II deal of the whole world, natively getting both versions.

Shenmue II uses ADX audio technology, wich has been a staple of Sega games back in the DC days. To be more precise, it uses the AHX sub-format for voices. I think it was also a potential part in the whole licensing sheenanigans with the rerelease. The Xbox version uses the same and the files are easily interchangable between the two versions.

From what I've seen so far, it seems that the voice clips in I&II actually sound a bit worse than the originals did and I think I know why as I recognize their acoustics from experience. They sound about like what you get when you convert the files with the widely available mod tools to WAV. They have something weird about them and many many players will makes them sound rather muffled and overly loud. I'm also pretty sure they did something like this just to get rid of the AHX format altogther, because of the afformentioned possible problems.

By the way, there is no excuse for the game's engine not to be able to handle higher quality sound. They have way advanced tech on their hands with I&II and in fact even the Dreamcast with AHX could go much higher. I have messed around with the audio a lot and Shenmue II can even handle 44 kHz AHX music snippets as voice files without any issues.
The problem might just be that they don't have the old masters anymore. Or they are in some very rough form. If they were properly prepared it would've been easier to use those than to pull out the ones from the game to convert them.
 
Thank you.

So basically, the information in the video wasn't completely accurate.
 
BlueMue said:
From what I've seen so far, it seems that the voice clips in I&II actually sound a bit worse than the originals did and I think I know why as I recognize their acoustics from experience. They sound about like what you get when you convert the files with the widely available mod tools to WAV. They have something weird about them and many many players will makes them sound rather muffled and overly loud.
I'm also pretty sure they did something like this just to get rid of the AHX format altogther, because of the afformentioned possible problems.
Click to expand...
I think the problem is how sound is being processed, as far as I know samples also go through DSP plus some digital filter if i'm not mistaken, the effect of last can be heard in BIOS when changing menus and I'm pretty sure it affects Ryo's footsteps sound. So the raw samples sound different from final output. I might be completely off here, but its just my theory.
 
My theory is that some audio players just can't handle the odd sampling rate or result of how the conversion to WAV does while decompressing. The whole matter is made even more confusing because the voices in Shenmue are STR files, a whole different animal.

If you throw them into audacity for example the waveform is sometimes very odd and only over or under the center line and it also sounds like described there. What I did myself to get around the degraded sound for the voice collection videos I made was throw the converted files into the ADX player from the official tools. It plays those WAVs just fine for some reason, even if pretty low level.
 
It's too bad they couldn't figure out how to release these with better audio. That would've made this an incredible package.
 
The Wolf King said:
Any word on which version of Yuan will be in 2? Or will it be female in English but male in Japanese?
Click to expand...
I'm wondering about that as well.
I'm sure they'll keep it simple and use the female JPN version, as well as the female ENG audio, in the West at least.
BUT...I'm curious about the upcoming Japanese release.

Sega originally went a bit schizo with Yuan in the West with the Dreamcast version. We had Japanese audio with a female actress taking on the role...but, IIRC, the original script was left untouched, meaning Ryo was still referring to "him" and making off colored remarks about the character.

Considering that this upcoming Japanese release is a bit "weird" (i.e. it's a unique edition that's released much later in one country, with extra goodies), will Sega perhaps keep Yuan as his original male self just for Japan?

Personally, I think they should've kept him "as is" everywhere, allowing us to experience Yu's original vision. Besides, the 'trans' thing is considered cool nowadays, so Sega would literally have more to gain by keeping that character intact vs retconning his existence & sexuality.
 
The Wolf King said:
Any word on which version of Yuan will be in 2? Or will it be female in English but male in Japanese?
Click to expand...
This should belong in the spoiler thread, but hopefully it's okay if I spoiler tag this.

They're using the original male dub for Yuan. One of the French streamers made to the Dou Jiang diner potion of the game today.

**Added Spoiler Tag**
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I've fixed the spoiler tag in your post and added one to punkmanced's post.

Please keep stuff like this to the dedicated spoiler thread until release. Thanks!
 
Jibby said:
I've fixed the spoiler tag in your post and added one to punkmanced's post.
Click to expand...
Thanks! The spoiler option built into the forum (under the ... menu) creates spoiler tags wrong, you don't see them at all in the dark theme. It's doing [SPOILER="Text here"][/SPOILER] instead of wrapping the text in the tags.

GYO6161 posted the answer in the spoilers thread about 15 minutes after I posted it here, so that's a better place to continue discussion about which dub they decided to include.
 
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