Terrible voice acting in games

Voice acting in video games is commonplace, with developers trying to get the best of the best to bring their characters to life.

Sometimes the voice acting is great, and sometimes it’s laughably abysmal. I have watched hundreds of videos in preparation for this list of the worst voice acting in a video game.

Dynasty Warriors 3

Some of you may love the Japanese to English lip-sync mashup; it’s great to watch on TV (and made Kung Pow a hilarious movie).

When it comes to games that formula does not work that well. You are stuck with voice acting that is not balanced with sound effects volume, and does not fit the character animations at all. This results in sad cinematics that degrade the overall experience of the game. Dynasty Warriors did just that, take a look:

Time Crisis and House of the Dead

Action games are supposed to have explosions and over-the-top voice acting; this combined with a cast of talented voice actors creates the perfect action game cinematic. Time Crisis and House of the Dead proved that everything that could possibly go wrong with a voice acting cast could exist in one game.

Watching these cinematics was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. First it sounds like the entire voice cast consisted of one person – a single voice actor for even the female lead. Then every new sentence is either louder or softer than one before. It’s trying to be so hardcore it’s ruining the game – listen for yourself, it’s just sad.

Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon

What isn’t wrong with the voice acting in Wand of Gamelon? Well for starters you cannot even make out what they are saying half the time – it’s so over the top and over exaggerated it becomes cheesy and cheap.

It sounds like they are talking to a 3 year old, and there are way too many “oh boy” in one sentence. This was one of the first games to ever feature fully voiced cinematics – thank the gaming gods we have evolved since then.

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 was one of the best sandbox games I have ever played. It was packed with things to do, and the only thing you didn’t want to do was listen to the terrible voice acting.

The voice acting sounded like a drunk person trying to be funny by mimicking an accent but comes off sounding really dumb and slightly offensive.

Two Worlds

Two Worlds isn’t that bad a game; it’s immersive and looks okay, but the voice acting is terrible.

At times it drifts into the realm of okay, but most of the time it sounds like a rehearsal that was recorded the first time the voice actors ever looked at their scripts. Seriously not ideal.

I know huge open world games are sometimes flawed when it comes to different voice actors performing many of the few characters, but there was no excuse for this.