spiraldoor wrote:The American voice is ridiculously over-the-top. That's not emotion, it's bad acting. The European voice is pretty hammy too, but he knows when to moderate it for dramatic effect, and he has a kind of innocence and earnestness that set the scene for the game much better than the cynical huckster thing the American version's got going on.
In the introduction, the Magician is clearly standing on some kind a stage in a spotlight, and he's also dressed like a 20's stage-performing magician. As such, that's immediately what I expect him to sound like, and in the American version, that's exactly what he sounds like. The animation for him is very wild and enthusiastic, and the voice accommodates this perfectly. It's enthusiastic and bright, and then it's quiet and brooding when it needs to be, just as if he were speaking to an audience, which is clearly what the setting of the introduction has implied. Sure, it's overly exaggerated, but that's exactly how stage performers acted at the time, which is why it works. An extravagant voice for an extravagant character, which is not only notable through his appearance and animation, but is further reinforced through his goals in Origins.
In the European version, he sounds like he's being voiced by a physically sick not-voice-actor who is speaking in falsetto for the very first time in their life and in light of that is constantly trying as hard as they can not to let their voice crack, which it sounds like it's about to crack every other sentence, and I'm pretty sure it actually does a bit at one point as well. Not only is the voice incredibly unfitting for a stage-magician, the quality of the recording is beyond abysmal: it sounds far too close, and he's speaking far too quietly to be able to hear him at the implied distance, and the low-mid frequencies are far too prominent to properly compensate for the quietness and distance from the camera when he's on-screen. As a final note on the actor's performance, it seems like half the time he isn't even aware of what he's doing, and the emphasis on certain words is just nonexistent. When he says "Let me tell you the story of Rayman", I literally snort it sounds so out of place; it's almost like the voice actor was purposely trying to come up with the most unfitting voice possible for the character, as well as mocking it with the worst emotive voice acting imaginable.
I hate the European voice with a passion. I think the only reason it was even allowed through production is for the same reason 'Bad Rayman' was: as a first game developed by some very French people, I doubt that most of them would know what's best for the English-speakers, let alone even understand the language, which is exactly the case with almost all poor low-budget dubbing. They just have to trust that the voice actors are doing their job.
