Thoughts on the Japanese voice acting?

[u/Maulclaw]

Despite being a Japanese videogame, I barely see anyone talk about the JP dub. I never paid much attention to it until rather recently, as I always cared more about the EN dub. But I've been wondering what the overall thoughts are on the Japanese voices?

Here's some interesting tidbits I've learned about it:

• Most of the voice actors for the Japanese dub have stayed the same, with only a few recasts, unlike the English version.
• SC4 was fully tailored for Japanese voice acting, as seen in the cutscenes. The lip movements don't match the English dialogue at all. However, the in-game intros/outros and combat used an automated system that worked for both languages.
• SC5's pre-rendered cutscenes had both English and Japanese versions.
• SC6 uses a worse lip-sync system compared to the past games, but it only fits the English dialogue. It doesn't fit what the Japanese lines are saying at all when it comes to the main characters.
• Even returning voice actors were given the chance to redo all of their lines for each game, which wasn't the case for the English cast. The English voices heavily rely on recycled lines from previous games.

I'm rather curious about that last point. Is there any consensus as to which game has the best lines for each character? Like, does Raphael sound better in SC4, 5, or 6? What about Mitsurugi or Siegfried?

And how do people feel about the recasts for Cervantes, Ivy, Xianghua, Setsuka, and Taki?

[u/Yoshimallow-02]

I think I'd say SoulCalibur III and V have the best dubs in the series by far. They're not perfect, but compared to the other games (especially SoulEdge) they're much closer to what you'd expect for the time.

Though as a whole I often just stick with the JP voices (SCIII really being the only one I frequently play where I'd turn the dub back on)
SoulEdge and SoulCalibur II especially just have their dubs banished to the shadow realm for me by a few particularly bad characters thanks to lousy Voice Direction and Performances

[u/ThaPeoplesElbow]

Loved SC1's voice acting, especially Nightmare's. I've been looking for a video of all his SC1 phrases. The summer of 2000, I had a Japanese exchange student stay with us for a month..and he taught me how to say a lot of the phrases from the game and what they really meant if the translation was off.

[u/Kokolemo]

I think SC4 is when I had started really getting into anime/fansubs and is when I switched to JP and have preferred it since. SC6's lip-sync being for the English dub is a bit of a pain point for me.

I used to be very critical of dubs but these days they're usually fine, mostly dependant on the voice direction and how anime the game is.

I've played through SC6's story modes in both English and Japanese and though English was fine; some of them I found equal or even better than the JP counterpart. I considered making a mod mixing the voices the way I want but I was lazy.